LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 




Slielf..ri3:!t 

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



BRIGHTENING THE WORLD 



BY 



HIRAM C. HAYDN 

CLEVELAND, OHIO 




NEW YORK J 4 

ANSON D. F. RANDOLPH & COMPANY 

(incorporated) 
182 FIFTH AVENUE 



Copyright, 1893, by 
ANSON D. F. RANDOLPH & COMPANY 

(incorporated) 



PRESS OF 
EDWARD O. JENKINS' SON, 
NEW YORK. 



DEDICATION. 



These chapters are inscribed to the Christian Endeavor 
Societies^ the Epworth and Westminster Leagues^ the 
Student Volunteers, and all similar organizations of 
the young people of our day — the Church of the near 
future — and to their near of kin. In the crimson 
dawn of a new era of life, light, and love for all 
men, these words are penned, in the hope that Our 
Lord Christ will use them to hasten the day of His 
kingdom and glory, 

THE AUTHOR, 



The Library 
OF Congress 



WASHINGTON 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

A Word to Begin With, . . - - 7 
I. Thyself Rightened— Righten the World, 9 

II. Thyself Brightened— Brighten THE World, 16 

III. Can the Ethiopian Change his Skin? — 

The Pessimist's Despair, - - - - 26 

IV. Brightness upon Brightness, - - - 36 
V. Their Fewness, a Mighty Host, - - - 41 

VI. Save Others — Save Thyself, - - - 49 

VII. Where to Begin and How to Go On— The 
Home: Feed its Fires and Fight its 
Foes, 58 

VIII. Home, Tenement, and Saloon, - - - 75 

IX. The Ethics of City Building and Admin- 
istration, - - - - - - - 91 

X. Church and National Life, - - - 108 

XI. The World, and the Whole of It, - - 124 
XII. Each according to his Several Ability, 141 

XIII. The Supreme Motive, - - - - - 161 

XIV. The Blessed Church of God, - - - 170 



A WORD TO BEGIN WITH. 



The era of practical Christianity which, for long, 
knocked at the door of the Church, has begun. It 
has not fully come, is not yet cordially, everywhere, 
welcomed ; but daily it counts its conquests, en = 
larges its sway. We are seeing, with new eyes, that 
the breadth of His Commandment is the breadth of 
His love ; that to save, He must be Master. Christ 
is both Saviour and Lord. 

The token of a saved man is obedience — obedience 
vitalized by love, because of oneness with Him who 
is the Life. We are saved to think the thoughts of 
Christ, and to live the life of Christ. He traverses 
the entire domain of life, and lays His hand on all 
the activities of men to redeem them from selfish- 
ness, and make them loving and true. His thoughts 
of kindness and His redeeming power are meant to 
be the heritage of every race of men, every continent, 
and every island of the sea. The nations that sit in 
darkness have been terribly wronged by the selfish- 
ness of the people who know the glad sound, and 
live in the great light. 

No less has the Christ been sadly misrepresented 
through the narrow conceptions and selfish inter- 
pretations put upon His Gospel. The emphasis for 
so long put upon dogma is being transferred to 
life. We have an ethical Christianity, or we have 
none. Grace is in order to life. Grace abounds 
that character and life may be made divine. The 

(7) 



8 BRIGHTENING THE WORLD. 



motive and the inspiration are commensurate with 
the thing to be done : to redeem the whole orb of 
life, and put the impress of Christ upon all human 
transactions, and every relation in which men stand 
to each other. 

Truth and life then meet, not only in the sanctu- 
ary of God on Sundays, but in the market-place, the 
high seats of learning and culture, the halls of mirth, 
the arena of politics, and the intercourse of nations. 
At every angle of life we are face to face with Christ. 
We meet Him in every man with whom we have to 
do. As we treat our fellow, so treat we Him. We 
are Christians when we believe His Word and live 
to His plan. But we have dared to say, "I be- 
lieve in God the Father Almighty,*' and in the 
same breath to renounce His mandate concerning 
the " every creature," to whom His message of life is 
to be given, as equally entitled to it with ourselves, 
and no less in need of it than are we. We are 
brethren. The brotherhood of man cannot be de- 
nied and the Fatherhood of God honored. 

Back to the Christ, from all the weary quest of 
the centuries, and all the dishonor of the past, men 
turn, to hear the simple but august words He spake 
on the Mount to all the waiting, coming world. The 
hand that was pierced leads the way through all the 
perplexing paths and vexing problems of our time, 
and to the world's end — to the last race, and the last 
man. Arise and follow Him, young soldiers of the 
cross. A brighter because more Christian era 
dawns. Be not found wanting. It is your business 
to brighten the world. 



1. 



THYSELF RIGHTENED— RIGHTEN THE 
WORLD. 

To whiten and brighten the world, we must make 
it our business to righten it. The man who sets 
things right is the man who is helping to transform 
the world. To do this, he must first be set right 
himself. This is the Divine order. Right the man, 
and win a force to righten somebody else. Blanch 
his soul into whiteness and expect him to be instru- 
mental in lessening the area of moral pollution. 
Bring him from darkness into light and expect him 
to shine as a light in this world. 

By a man set right is not meant a man made per- 
fect, but set in the attitude of a filial child toward 
God, and of a brother toward his fellow. On the 
one hand, he is asking after God's rule of right for 
himself, reaching out after it, and growing up toward 
it. For this he has the promise of Divine aid in the 
gift of the Holy Spirit, and the inspiring and fruitful 
nurture of God's Word and the appointed sacraments 
and services of His house. 

Concerning this, there is no utterance more pro- 
found, none more true, than Paul's to the Philip- 
plans : " Work out your own salvation with fear 

(9) 



BRIGHTENING THE WORLD. 



and trembling, for it is God that worketh in you 
both to will and to do of His good pleasure." 
Here is both the warrant and the encouragement to 
set about rightening one's self. It is that God is in- 
terested in this matter, as a father in the welfare 
and struggle of a child. He makes our battle His 
own, and we are encouraged to draw upon His re- 
sources in our weakness and our need. 

The Gospel and the schools of ethical culture are 
here far apart, in both their method and their spirit. 
They both appeal to all that is best and noblest in 
human nature, to conscience and manliness and self- 
respect, to rise up out of weakness and sin, and be 
strong. Be a man. Know thyself, and be true to 
thyself. But the school of culture will hold that a 
man is equal to this of himself, and will tell him 
that Nature through her recuperative processes will 
work with him according to her laws, and her re- 
ward is both ample and precious. That there is 
truth in this, let no man deny. It need not be said 
that, working along this line, no lasting good is ac- 
complished nor eternal fruit garnered ; for, in ap- 
pealing to Nature, and striving to be true to her, the 
unknown and unnamed God, the Father of our Lord 
Jesus Christ, may come in contact with the soul 
through Nature which is His. 

But this appeal, at best, reaches the few, not the 
many. The man born blind, the man lame from his 
mother's womb, the leprous in body, the Magdalens 
leprous in soul, the wasted by appetite's wan rule, 
the scorched by passion's fires, the ignorant, the dis- 
couraged, hear this brave summons that sounds so 



THYSELF RIGHTENED, 



II 



finely, and know that they have no reserve force 
with which to meet it ; and they have been downed 
too often by foes mightier than they to have any 
courage left to feed the hope of success — this for the 
best informed of them all. 

The larger multitude stare in wonder, not know- 
ing what is meant. Their ideals are gathered up 
among themselves. They have their own heroes, 
saying to one another, " I'm as big a man as Grant 
and to us, "Our way is our way; your way is your 
way." " I'm as good as you." They have no concep- 
tion of what we mean by rising up and being true to 
one's self. The ideals of civilization, much more of 
the Gospels, are as far from them as the moon. 

Quite otherwise is it when the Christ stands before 
the crippled in body and in soul, and with His Word, 
" Arise and walk ! " " Be thou clean ! " " Ephatha ! 
Be thou opened!" comes the consciousness of a great, 
loving, powerful personality behind it ! goes the 
Might to do the bidden thing ! and lo, the blind see, 
the dumb speak, the leper is cleansed, the Magdalen 
follows in tears and in peace. He is, at once, the in- 
spirer of a new ideal, and the giver of heart, courage, 
and might to reach out after it. Nobody thinks of 
challenging Him with the vulgar, but commonly 
too true — "I'm as good as you." "My way is as 
good as your way." Instinctively men know better. 
A new type of man has come into the world. " The 
gods have come down to us in the likeness of men ! " 
True, in a sense far more divine than the simple peo- 
ple of Lystra ever dreamed. 

This is why the schools of culture can show, in- 



12 BRIGHTENING THE WORLD, 



deed, their pretty posy bed that they have platted 
and weeded; while the Gospel is tracking the con- 
tinents and traversing the seas — setting cannibals 
on their feet as men, with the love of God and their 
fellow in their simple souls, and the songs of Zion 
on their lips, as they take the supper of peace which 
our Lord left us and them ; or, taming such men of 
brain and muscle as were the ancestors of the world's 
conquering races to-day, who hold in one hand the 
torch of knowledge, in the other the weapons of 
enterprise and from their mighty seats rule the 
world ! 

Nor is it here intended to make any contention as 
between those on the one hand, who seem to think 
that to be born of the Spirit there must be a defi- 
nite experience of a sudden and instantaneous sort, 
most true of many as of Saul of Tarsus — and those 
on the other hand, who depend upon Christian nur- 
ture and a teachable spirit in attendance upon the 
ordinances of the church, to gradually renew and 
transform the hearts and lives of men. It would be 
the height of impertinence to say of this latter 
method that it is not one of the valid ways of ap- 
proach to men, finding ample warrant in its fruits. 

Nor dare we say that, outside any distinctive 
church fold, and apart from any of the ordinary 
and recognized ways of coming into the kingdom, 
there may not be very many, taught and led of the 
Spirit, who are, themselves, on the way to that 
righteousness that Christ preached, and are also 
the righteners of others. 

Of all this One is the Judge. But for each and all, 



THYSELF RIGHTENED, 



13 



there is one faith, one Lord, one baptism ; one re- 
newing and sanctifying spirit of truth and life and 
love ; one Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ, and all are 
one in Him; one law of righteousness and pattern 
of all perfection. There is for no man any escape 
from the Master's " Ye must be born again! " " Born 
from above!" Make the tree good and his fruit 
good." 

But this man, himself rightened, whoever he may 
be, and however he has come at it, through what- 
ever process, on the human side— there can be but 
one, on the Divine side — is not only a new man in 
his attitude toward God, but quite as much toward 
his fellow. He can never in indifference or con- 
tempt be found saying, "Am I my brother's keep- 
er?" Leave that to Cain and the antediluvians. 

Nor ought it to be needful to the Gospel-taught 
man seriously to inquire, And who is my brother ? 
If he do not recognize the brotherhood of man, how 
can he be sure that he knows the fatherhood of 
God ? If a man love not his brother whom he hath 
seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen ? " 
These are twin births in the human soul — the 
awakening to the fatherhood of God and to the 
brotherhood of man — though this latter seems a 
long time getting its eyes open. Indeed, it may be 
said of both, that their full unfolding is often of slow 
development, as is apt to be true of grand and 
inspiring ideas somewhat dimly conceived, at first, 
and very imperfectly understood. 

Herein, an anomaly presents itself, when human- 
itarian culture se@ms to outrun Christian faith. This 



14 



BRIGHTENING THE WORLD, 



is thought to be a fact. But is it ? It might be 
allowed that the flower of the one sort outranks the 
weeds of the other sort. Account for it as we may, 
it is true that the lives of many are better than their 
creed. And the converse is also true. Too many 
who nominally stand for the noblest faith of the 
ages — ministers and laymen of the Christian Church 
not a few — seem to lack the milk of human kind- 
ness. No one could well be more hard on their fel- 
lows. It is idle to look to them for sympathy, and 
the encouragement of fellow-feeling. Fellow-feel- 
ing is just what they lack. They have never serious- 
ly cared to put themselves in the other fellow's 
place, nor thoughtfully considered who hath made 
them to differ. 

Moreover, quite too much has the church been 
occupied with her spiritualities to the exclusion of 
the temporalities of her ministration. Her eyes 
have been not too much, perhaps, on the next world, 
but too little on this. She has cared not too much 
for the souls of men, but too little for their bodies. 
Quite too much has she toiled, as if to get men 
ready to die, rather than to fit men to live, were her 
mission. In this she has, for long periods, patterned 
but remotely after her great Exemplar, who so won- 
drously and so wisely mingled temporal and eter- 
nal things, ministered to the bodies as well as to 
the souls of men; not only raised the dead child, 
but directed that she be nourished. 

In all this considerate thoughtfulness He but 
advanced upon the gracious and humane provisions 
of the Mosaic code, Brotherliness is the teaching 



THYSELF RIGHTENED, 



of both dispensations. The whole law is fulfilled in 
this — the love of God and of thy neighbor. And 
there is no such thing as Tightening the world 
except as we recognize both the fatherhood of God 
and the brotherhood of man. Our emphasis, for a 
good while, needs to be on the brotherhood of all 
men ; on the humanities, so often overlooked ; on 
temporal ministrations that may pave the way to a 
hunger for spiritual and eternal good ; while to fur- 
^ ther the kingdom of God, to make men Christian, 
is the end of Christian humanitarianism as of all 
churchly work. 



II. 



BE THYSELF BRIGHTENED— BRIGHTEN 
THE WORLD. 

The man Tightened in a Gospel way is meant to' 
be a happy man. Happiness is brightness. Right- 
ened and not brightened ? Here, verily, is some- 
thing wrong. The divorce of gladness from right- 
eousness is not only a mistake, it puts the Gospel in 
a wrong light. It subtracts from its fullness of bless- 
ing in experience, and from the possibilities of doing 
good. It takes a brightened life to brighten others. 
It was the sun of righteousness in the Christ that 
made Him the light of the world. Man of sorrows, 
though He was; once, '^exceeding sorrowful even 
unto death yet do we feel that His was a joy that 
sounded the depths of Peace. And Peace is never 
weak, never despairing. It is strong with a courage 
born of Hope. 

And what could He ask for His disciples more 
than that His joy might be fulfilled in them ? The 
joy of the Christ was the perfect oneness of His 
will with the Father's will, and the delight of being 
a constant benediction to others. Blessed, He was 
made a blessing. The Psalmist was right. "Restore 
unto me thy joy, then will I teach." Let us see. 
(i6) 



BE THYSELF BRIGHTENED. 



I. The Tightened man is a man forgiven. Conscious 
of forgiveness, he sings, and lives in sin no more. 
Forgiveness is such a happifying thing. When is a 
child happy if not when folded to the parental heart 
after some bitter experience of evil-doing. It is not 
a laughing, noisy joy, but still and too deep for 
words. My Peace I give unto you,*' has measure- 
less depths of blessed content. God's way of right- 
ening men thrusts forgiveness to the fore. From 
the Cross : Yes, from the Cross, hear it ; Father ! 
forgive them ! " Give them another chance, it says, 
in behalf of sinful men. What saith the law ? 

Stone her." What saith grace? "Go and sin no 
more." Forgive the breach of the law and win to 
the obedience of the law. The cross makes possible 
what is thus set forth as the good news of God; as 
saith that mysterious — " the Lord hath laid on Him 
the iniquity of us all.'* The love of Christ con- 
straineth. 

Many have stumbled at this, seeing how it has 
been perverted into an opiate for the conscience, as if 
men were to say : " God is merciful ; let us sin on." 
As though the child's unconcern over wrong-doing 
were the all-and-end-all of a great business when it 
says : " God loves to forgive sin. That is what God 
is for"! But "forgiveness is not a substitute for 
goodness." It is an inspiration to goodness. ^^It is 
the setting loose of a new moral force, a new means 
of restoring in man that which religion and morality 
alike seek to restore — the perfect character." Aw- 
fully abused it has been, both before and since the 
Reformation. But to him who thinks the gift ol 



i8 



BRIGHTENING THE WORLD. 



forgiveness can be purchased with money, and en- 
joyed without a change of heart and life, but one 
thing is to be said: **Thy money perish with 
thee/' Forgiveness is the starting point of a new 
life dedicated to the service of God and man ; the 
setting free of new forces for the regeneration of the 
world." The fact of forgiveness is to be read in the 
renewed life, as in the fruits of the Spirit we read 
the evidence of faith. 

In that beautiful picture of forgiven souls in the 
second chapter of the Acts, where love prevails over 
all selfishness, and day by day they did take their 
food with gladness and singleness of heart, prais- 
ing God and having all things common — small won- 
der is it that they are said to have had "favor with 
all the people"; or that ''the Lord added to them 
day by day those that were being saved." Such 
gladness is the direct sequence to forgiveness, and 
carries in itself a happy and winsome contagion. 

2. The new life that begins with forgiveness is 
meant to be glad, and true, and strong — ought to be, 
needs to be. Ought to be, for it is the life of a filial 
child in the Great Father's house. He hears as from 
the heaven of Divine love, All things are yours, my 
child, — things present, things to come ; life, death — 
all are yours, for ye are Christ's and Christ is God's. 

Child-life in a true home is the ideal of bright and 
joyous life on earth. It is throughout the embodi- 
ment of pure impulses and of healthy activity. So 
the forgiven man steps into a child's place to lead 
the life that befits the new relationship. The Christ 
Himself fulfilled it, so teaching us how. He made it His 



BE THYSELF BRIGHTENED, 



19 



meat and drink to do the will of His Father in heav- 
en — to heed the laws which God has impressed upon 
both soul and body. Hear him : " I do always those 
things which please Him/' There was in Him no 
diseased mind, no perverse will, no cramped, belit- 
tled intelligence, no selfish ambition. All was open, 
free, clear, bright, and strong. 

But Christ is more than an impossible ideal. The 
successes of this world, surely, as often discourage 
as stir to emulation. See," we say, " what this man 
has done by his unaided exertion ! Now, why not 
you be somebody too ? Come, bestir thyself ! " As 
often as otherwise that call falls on the ears of men 
oppressed with a certainty of conviction that it is not 
for them; that the obstacles and limitations in their 
way are insurmountable. And if Christ were only 
a perfect ideal, a great way removed from us, as if 
set upon a pedestal for us to copy, nothing could 
well be more disheartening. Not so. He puts Him- 
self by our side ; nay. He comes to be the inspira- 
tion of our life — to make His abode with us — to 
make the impossible possible ; that we may despair 
at nothing : that we may see that, casting out devils, 
raising the dead, cleansing the lepers, opening blind 
eyes, stilling the storm, He is teaching us, as if all 
this were a parable, that so it shall be with us if we 
take Him into the partnership of our lives. 

What a wealth of divinely inspired courage is in 
Paul's saying: " I can do all things through Christ, 
which strengtheneth me ! " And what a buoyancy 
of healthy life in the words: "We are pressed on 
every side, yet not straitened; perplexed, yet not un- 



BRIGHTENING THE WORLD. 



to despair; pursued, yet not forsaken; smitten down, 
yet not destroyed." "Light shall shine out of dark- 
ness, who shined in our hearts, to give the light of 
the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of 
Jesus Christ." This is the language of sonship in 
Christ, full of inspired and inspiring hope. 

Such not only ought, such needs to be the new life 
we live, for our own sake and the sake of the world. 
Not otherwise can we realize in ourselves the great- 
ness, the fullness, the blessedness of our calling in 
Christ to be the sons of God. To fail here is no 
light matter were we alone concerned. But this is 
less than the half of it. It has been well said : 
" Every good that enters the world, enters through 
an individual — a conscious, reasonable, moral man "; 
and it depends on the quality of the man what 
measure of good he brings to the home, to society, 
to the Church, the State, to the great family of the 
human race. One may be a good deal of a man, 
and set the Gospel all aside and reckon this Divine 
indwelling a thing of words — words only. And men, 
who assent to the truth of God working in us to 
will and to do, may still so put their emphasis on 
merely human elements of culture and discipline as 
to make scant use of the divine power within their 
reach, and still be men of a good deal of conse- 
quence. 

But put with all a man can do with his unaided 
powers, all that God can do through him, when wel- 
comed to warm his heart, to inspire his thought, di- 
rect his energies, fill him with courage and hope, 
and how much more of a man you have, or can have, 



BE THYSELF BRIGHTENED. 21 



than on any other possible line of movement. If 
this world is to be brightened, it must be through 
persons thus brought into vital relations with Him 
who is the fullness of Divinity, the very effulgence 
of God. For the problem is immense. It is too 
great for man unaided. He cannot brighten himself, 
much less the world. Think what the Christ made 
of the men He called from the fisher's boat, and the 
receipt of custom. Think how He has been fashion- 
ing the great lights of history, the moving spirits of 
the world's great eras, calling them oftener, far oft- 
ener than otherwise, from the humbler walks of life, 
as freer from the trammels of a blind conservatism, 
less hampered by traditions, narrowed by systems of 
men, tied up to the old, afraid of the new. These be 
the men He has fashioned as instruments of power 
— " a stream of living men, whose course was ruled 
by love," from the little company of believers, bap- 
tized of the Holy Ghost at Pentecost, to this very 
day ; a stream hemmed in by no high barriers of 
mountain wall, but overflowing its banks to fertilize 
the world. Such living is glad, true, strong, re- 
demptive. 

3. But man must suffer, and suffering must be 
brightened. From suffering no man is exempt. This 
world never learned the meaning of suffering, never 
thought of glorifying it, till the lesson was learned 
in the Holy Scriptures of Jew and Christian. 
Herein is the faith of the Bible isolated from all 
other faiths. How the refrain comes down the ages 
— Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your 
God." And the God of consolation is the source of 



BRIGHTENING THE WORLD. 



the comfort, who says : I will never leave thee nor 
forsake thee"; who unveils the possibility that pres- 
ent suffering may work out "a far more exceeding 
and eternal weight of glory." Nay, of us as of 
Christ is it true — " made perfect through suffering." 
There is not a couch of pain nor a haunt of poverty, 
a burdened spirit nor a wronged through others' 
guilt, a heart bereaved, a home made desolate, but 
the Gospel has a word of cheer and a messenger of 
comfort ready, which may be ours if we will. Your 
sorrow shall be turned into joy." 

Look at the facts. Hear the greatly suffering 
Apostle : I am filled with comfort, I overflow with 
joy in all our affliction." This is one of the men 
who, in the inner prison of Philippi, his feet in 
stocks, not knowing what daybreak might bring with 
it for him, prayed and sang praises unto God. And 
the brightness of the prison brightened the jailor's 
heart and house ! To certain Hebrew believers this 
noble testimony is borne : " Ye both had compassion 
on them that were in bonds, and took joyfully the 
spoiling of your possessions, knowing that ye your- 
selves have a better possession and an abiding one." 

This patient gladness of the followers of Christ in 
the early centuries of persecution smote the Roman 
world into amazement. This cheerful courage, born 
of faith, they knew not. Likewise, from the great 
army of missionary workers, in loneliness, sickness, 
hostility of evil men, what an array of testimony to 
the power of the Gospel to make the chamber of 
suffering a chamber of peace ! This is true — the 
power is here — in spite of the fact that there are so 



BE THYSELF BRIGHTENED. 



many inconsolable lives, so many who only feel the 
abrasions of pain, and chafe as though there were 
no balm in Gilead and no physician there.'* Also 
in spite of the fact that funereal custom often shuts 
out all the Gospel light, and wraps in sackcloth the 
faces that, upturned to God, might catch the light 
that streams from the crowned head of the once man 
of sorrows. What a mercy if all the sackcloth of 
all the looms in the world could be gathered into 
one great bonfire, and the New Testament Son of 
Consolation robe us in garments of praise instead of 
the weeds of woe. How the great poets interpret 
for us the spirit of the Gospel, and bid us be of 
good cheer. 

" Grow old along with me ! The best is yet to be, 
The last of life, for which the first was made ; our times are 
in His hand, 

Who saith : ' A whole, I planned ; youth shows but half; trust 
God ; see all, nor be afraid ! ' " * 
** Blindfolded and alone I wait ; 
Loss seems too bitter, gain too late ; 
Too heavy burdens on the road ; 
And joy is weak, and grief is strong, 
And years and days so long, so long ! 
Yet this one thing I learn to know 
Each day more surely as I go. 
That I am glad the good and ill 
By changeless law are ordered still. 
Not as I will." 

" Not as I will, because the one 
Who loved us first and best has gone 



* Robert Browning.. 



BRIGHTENING THE WORLD, 



Before us on the road, and still 
For us must all His love fulfill — 
Not as I will."* 

Every one in whom suffering is brightened is by 
so much the better qualified to brighten others. 
"Our highest thoughts, our noblest movements, 
have issued from suffering souls.** "Agony wrung 
the Reformation from Luther. When David's soul 
was smitten sorest, his harp was sweetest." And do 
not we ourselves know, who have been in the school 
of suffering and resigned ourselves to God, what a 
school of wisdom He has made our day of trial for 
some greater work that lay before us ? 

4. Men must die, and dying needs to be bright- 
ened. In itself and by itself, it is a very sad, repel- 
lant experience, this dying. But it is the one thing 
from which no man can get away. And the Gospel 
that floods the grave with the light of immortality, 
and challenges death to do its worst, and enables us 
to say, we conquer though we die, conquerors are 
we and more than conquerors," is a great Gospel ; 
never greater than just here, in the face of utter rout, 
to inspire undying hope, with the vision of heaven 
opened, and the risen Christ, Vanquisher of Death, 
saying : " Fear not ! Be of good cheer, I have over- 
come." And the child of faith trusts and sings : 

" Out to the earthward brink 
Of that great tideless sea 
Light from Christ's garments streams. 



* Helen Hunt Jackson. 



BE THYSELF BRIGHTENED, 25 

Believing thus, I joy although I lie in dust, 

I joy, not that I ask or choose. 
But simply that I must. 

I love and fear not ; and I cannot lose 
One instant, this great certainty of peace ! 
Long as God ceases not, I cannot cease : 
I must arise." 

Thyself, rightened, brightened after this fashion, 
take out into this poor, troubled, disjointed world 
of ours, everywhere, the Gospel that has rightened 
thee, and never fear but that thus God, through you, 
is putting forth His power to save and brighten the 
world. 



Ill 



CAN THE ETHIOPIAN CHANGE HIS SKIN ? 
—THE DESPAIR OF THE PESSIMIST. 

That this world of mankind needs Tightening in 
every aspect of individual and associate life— the 
family and the state, society and business — we need 
scarcely, trouble ourselves to affirm, much less 
argue. The fact nobody questions. But what can 
be done about it ? Is there a remedy ? Is any genu- 
ine rightening and brightening possible ? The 
problem is immense and there are pessimists not a 
few. 

But find its parallel in the physical world. There 
is not a square foot of soil, nor a square yard of 
desert jungle, that does not await the kindly touch 
of intelligent husbandry to bud and bloom. The 
wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for 
them, and the desert shall bud and blossom as the 
rose." This is literal fact as well as spiritual sym- 
bolism. 

A lazy man and a dullard stands before a square 
mile of thicket and marsh land, and sees in it no 
possibilities of good. It is not to be taken as a 
gift, he says: while he is napping, his enterprising 
neighbor of faith and intelligence clears off the 

(26) 



CAN THE ETHIOPIAN CHANGE HIS SKIN? 27 



thicket and burns it over, drives a ditch or two 
through it, tears up the roots, harrows and sows it, 
and now awaits the best of harvests from the rich- 
est of loams ! The wilderness is glad. 

"Wise men" shake their heads over vast tracts of 
desert lands, worse than worthless; a positive men- 
ace to civilization, a great separating expanse, worse 
than the salt sea which may be sailed and is all the 
time fished ! But the conclusions of the "wise" are 
brought to naught, when a sensible farmer digs a ditch 
through the arid waste and lets in upon it the treas- 
ures of the snow now flowing in torrents down the 
mountain sides, a great supply for a great want. Or 
he bores into the earth and touches its hidden 
springs that gush forth in welcome abundance. 
And lo ! homes and gardens, grains and grasses, 
fruits and flowers, flocks and herds, yea, towns and 
cities, where the " WMse men " saw only desolation ! 
The desert buds and blossoms. " The restorer of 
paths to dwell in, has been here." "The soul is sat- 
isfied in dry places, and the bones are made strong, 
for the desert has become a watered garden, and 
like a spring of water, whose waters fail not ! " 

The desolation was not overrated by wise man or 
brain-sick, heart-sick emigrant, traversing the inter- 
minable waste, but the possibilities were not seen. 
The supply of God's ordaining, to match want, was 
not so much as in their thought. 

So of this world of mankind. The " wise men " look 
into this and that city "slum " of mingled nationali- 
ties in poverty, degradation, and sin, and shake their 
knowing heads. The only question that comes into 



28 BRIGHTENING THE WORLD. 



their minds is — How to fence it in ? How to defend 
themselves from this breeding-place of pestilence, 
anarchy and crime ? They have no thought but that 
it must rot ! The suggestion of Tightening and 
brightening it, is to such men wholly Utopian. At 
best, we can only suppress with the strong hand of 
law. 

But, plant in the midst a little colony of half a 
dozen Christian workers. Give them a chapel and 
the Word of God. Give them a modest supply of 
food, raiment, and medicine, — don't be mean about 
it, — and let these sisters of the risen Lord go to and 
fro among these homes of sin and wretchedness, 
cooling the fevered brow, tending the couch of sick- 
ness, praying by the bedside of the dying, caring 
for little children, preaching the Gospel of the resur- 
rection — and the whiteness and the brightness of 
these souls, radiant with the love of God, will begin 
to righten things ; to reduce chaos to order, to shame 
the turbulent, to win the sinner to the righteousness 
of Christ, to transform the slum into a citizen 
neighborhood. 

The "wise man'* says, "That's fine! How do 
you know?" Because it has been done once, and 
again, and again. Ask Chicago, Boston, New York ! 
It is being done all the time ; increasingly done more 
and more ; needs to be done on a larger scale still. 
There is no other way to transform the moral wil- 
derness and make it glad. This is God's way, and 
it wins. 

The " wise men " come upon this and that race 
of savages in the untrodden wilds of this conti- 



r 



CAN THE ETHIOPIAN CHANGE HIS SKIN? 29 



nent, unkempt, ignorant, brutal, vermin-covered, 
herding like beasts, making slaves of their women, 
living by the chase and the catch of rivers and lakes. 
Nothing can well be more hopeless of uplift ! All 
the "wise men" can do is to run to the shelter of 
their guns. All they think the red man good for is 
to be shot. " The only good Indian is the dead 
one." The idea of civilizing savages, of Christian- 
izing these beastly men, is to them too absurd to 
waste breath upon ! 

Then here is something too tough for God and the 
church. Then this Gospel is not for universal man ! 
Have we come to this ? Find a hero of the Chris- 
tian faith willing like men of old to take his life in 
one hand, the Gospel in the other ; give him a wife 
of courage and consecration to match, and send 
them forth, and don't forget them as they pass 
beyond the confines of civilization, and press on 
into the wilderness to seek these lost children of the 
Great Spirit, and tell them the Gospel of His Son ! 

Now, hear from their own lips the wondrous 
story of the marvellous transformation. No pen can 
overdraw the abject degradation to begin with — 
only a pen dipped in the blood of redemption can 
tell how they drank in the story. And when light 
broke into their souls they began to righten their 
lives ; to make themselves homes and brighten 
them ; to share their burdens, men with women ; 
to pattern after the "praying master" and his wife 
with the white skin — the missionaries ; to clear 
fields, sow grain, adopt the arts of peace — a Chris- 
tianized, civilized community of three thousand 



BRIGHTENING THE WORLD, 



souls, " living like white folks," which is supposed 
to be the ultima thule of the human race.* All this 
in twenty years or less ! The wisdom of the " wise " 
He bringeth to nought. The wilderness is glad. 

Follow a little band of American missionaries into 
the heart of the Pacific as they touch the Hawaiian 
Islands. It is April, 1819. ^*A strange revolution had 
destroyed the national idols, burned the temples, 
abolished the priesthood and human sacrifices. But 
society was in ruins. The language was unwritten. 
The nation was composed of thieves, drunkards, 
and debauchees. The land was owned by the king 
and his chiefs, and the people were slaves. Consti- 
tutions, laws, courts of justice there were none, and 
no conception of such things in the native mind. 
Property, life, everything was in the hands of arbi- 
trary, irresponsible chiefs, who filled the land with 
discord and oppression." f Forty years thereafter 
Hawaii was declared a Christian nation, though 
but partially civilized. Everything was on a Chris- 
tian basis, and one-fourth of the people were mem- 
bers of the Christian church. They had witnessed 
Pentecostal scenes as wonderful as that recorded in 
the Acts, and the story of redeemed lives takes up 
and continues the narrative of the Gospels, for it is 
the same Christ that touches these leprous ones, 
and they live the life of the renewed in spirit. 

Of this great work of transformation Richard H. 
Dana, a Boston lawyer, said: "In less than forty 



* Edgerton Young among the Crees of British America, 
t A. B. C. F. M. Mem. Vol., pp. 254, 393. 



CAN THE ETHIOPIAN CHANGE HIS SKIN? 31 



years they have taught this whole people to read and 
to write, to cipher and to sew. They have given them 
an alphabet, grammar, and dictionary ; preserved 
their language from extinction ; given it a litera- 
ture, and translated into it the Bible and works of 
devotion, science, and entertainment. They have 
established schools, reared up native teachers, and 
so pressed their work that now the proportion of 
inhabitants who can read is greater than in New 
England. And whereas they found these islanders 
a nation of half-naked savages, living in the surf 
and on the sand, eating raw fish, fighting among 
themselves, tyrannized over by feudal chiefs, and 
abandoned to sensuality, they now see them decent- 
ly clothed, recognizing the law of marriage," self- 
governed, and so on. This was in i860. 

The story of these islands for the last thirty years 
has been complicated with that of people of other 
nationalities who have been drawn to this paradise of 
the Pacific for commercial reasons, till its annual 
commerce has risen into the millions. This creation 
of something out of nothing, this transformation of 
abhorrent savagery into Christian decency, is a tri- 
umph of the Gospel in the face of infidel pessimism 
declaring such a work an impossibility, and consign- 
ing all such peoples to hopeless and irredeemable 
destruction. 

Had they ever made any approach to these islands 
during this century it would have been under cover 
of men-of-war. If they had taken possession it 
would have been to have driven them with shot and 
shell off these fair isles into the sea. The Gospel 



BRIGHTENING THE WORLD, 



of Peace at the hands of American missionaries 
made these islands accessible, in safety, to the out- 
side world, a coveted possession by the nations 
of the earth. If they belong to anybody, it is to 
the United States. 

Not a whit less marvellous is the story of the Fiji 
and the Samoan Islands,— the one under the touch 
of the Wesleyans; the other, of the Independents, of 
England. In the face of death, and appalled not by 
martyrdoms, they persisted in carrying the Gospel 
to these cannibal isles, for they were children of 
simple faith in Him who said, This do — Lo, I am 
with you alway ! The Gospel triumphed and made 
these beautiful tropic isles accessible to the outside 
world, safe of approach. Once, where only man 
was vile, now the vile are chiefly imported from 
without. 

And in the wake of the missionary come the great 
powers of the earth, — Germany, England, Spain, set- 
ting up the right of might to gather the harvest of 
gain — which they call a " protectorate.*' To these 
tropic isles, with their sunny clime, and soft and per- 
fumed gales, hasten the invalids of sterner lands, 
and novelists who slander the faith, but for whose 
benign and saving power going before, they had 
never risked their precious heads beneath the palms, 
nor trod their shell-strewn sands. 

Oh, at what cost have these Pacific Isles been 
brightened because rightened and whitened by the 
Gospel of the Son of God at the hands of men of 
faith who hazarded their lives. Many of them per- 
ished through the blind cruelty of the very people 



CAN THE ETHIOPIAN CHANGE HIS SKIN? 33 



they went forth to save, while the unbelieving and 
the worldly stayed behind in safety, carping at their 
foolish waste and satirizing their blessed work. 
But it's the old story of the Gospel of sacrifice — the 
grain of wheat falling into the ground to yield a 
great increase. Still the mouth of gainsayers is 
never stopped. " Curse ye Meroz, said the angel of 
the Lord, curse ye bitterly the inhabitants thereof ! 
Because they came not to the help of the Lord, to 
the help of the Lord against the mighty ! " 

How many times, and for how long, have the 
^Svise men" been saying: it is idle to think of 
Christianizing the African ? They have even denied 
him a place in the human race. Consistently with 
this affront upon God, and this outrage upon man, 
they have enslaved him, bought and sold him, till 
the story of African wrongs is too appalling for be- 
lief — too outrageous to read and sleep on, except in 
troubled dreams. Can the Dark Continent be 
blanched into whiteness ? Brightened, till the dusky 
faces shine in the light of God ? Rightened, after these 
ages of crookedness? Do not ask the ^'wise men." 
Have done with the unbelieving. Do not take the 
serious inquiry to the rank and file of the Church 
of Christ, even. Take it to the elect souls of Chris- 
tendom. Call up the shades of heroes and martyrs. 
Let Lindley and Adams and Pinkerton and Moffat 
and Hannington be heard ! Listen to the intrepid 
and versatile Mackay of Uganda. Let Livingstone 
speak from under the vaulted arches of Westmin- 
ster. These be the knights of the Holy Cross, whose 
faith took them far afield, and who triumphed though 



BRIGHTENING THE WORLD. 



they fell. They knew who had said : " Ethiopia shall 
stretch out her hands unto God." They had had a 
vision of the multitu de innumerable before the throne, 
and discerned the eunuch of Ethiopia, and the later 
born of like precious faith, from the North and the 
South, the East and the West, from the heart of the 
Dark Continent, and made no question but that they 
were the forerunners of a mightier host to be gath- 
ered out of Africa's dark races. The continent 
brightens under the touch of Divine love. 

The Moravians, asking for work that nobody else 
would do, went to the forlorn hope of humanity — 
among the stolid Esquimaux of the North, the 
wretched negroes of the West Indies under the fear- 
ful demoralization of English rule, to the Indians of 
the Mosquito Coast, to the natives of Australia, to 
the deadly fever belt of Africa, to Thibet ! Not a 
land, not a people, have they touched which has not 
responded to the heavenly culture. 

So of Christian work among the Teloogoos of 
India, and the lower castes of the Punjaub and of 
Laos. The new light in the soul has brought a new 
purpose into the life, to make the outward condi- 
tions correspond to the inward uplift. It is not a 
matter of civilizing and then Christianizing. This 
method with barbarous peoples signally fails. It is 
like grafting a living scion upon a dead stock. The 
Christianized instinctively seek for themselves the 
decencies of apparel, of home, and of life, as alone 
congruous with awakened self-respect. 

And though it has always been true, and is, that the 
common people gladly hear and the more readily fol- 



CAN THE ETHIOPIAN CHANGE HIS SKIN? 35 



low the new light, as being more open to conviction 
and more conscious of need, yet is it also true that 
Christianity has proved a saving power among the 
noblest races and the higher castes, and raised up 
apostles of the faith under whom new centres of 
Gospel light and peace have been created like the 
Bethel of Sheshadri in India, Stewart's Lovedale in 
South Africa, Duncan's Metlakahtla, or the Doshi- 
sha of Neesima in Japan. It has found as hearty a 
welcome on the table-lands of Africa from the great 
lakes to the South Cape, where the stalwart races 
live whom Livingstone complimented as being ^'as 
good stuff to make men of as were the ancient 
Britons from whom we sprung,'* as among the 
weakly peoples of the malarious coast ; among the 
Armenians of Asia Minor, as among the Malays of 
Polynesia. It is well-nigh impossible to measure, 
to even conceive, what a brightness the Gospel has 
already brought into the lives of oppressed and 
wretched peoples, the victims of horrible supersti- 
tions and a terrible tyranny. 



IV. 



BRIGHTNESS UPON BRIGHTNESS. 

Brightness rays out in many directions, and breaks 
forth in quarters where once we looked not for it. 
Look in another direction and see what has been 
done for childhood. It is not strange that the story 
of the Babe of Bethlehem should sing its way into 
the heart of children, or that they should be easily 
persuaded to trust themselves to Him who said : 
Suffer the little children to come unto Me," and 
when they came took them to His loving heart and 
blessed them. But what this brightness means that 
lights up the pitiful face of the children of the poor 
in our great cities, not only of the w^orthy poor, but 
of the criminal and dissolute classes, who can tell ? 
Or with what a strange, heavenly light it falls upon 
the lot of multitudes, systematically cast out to die 
or sold for the basest purposes, in such a land as 
China. 

And then to think of the communities of children 
gathered by the hand of Christian love into asylums 
for orphans, for blind, and deaf and dumb, and the 
w^eak-minded, into industrial schools; of the kinder- 
garten, brightening the day for millions, in the 
slums of cities, in the high places of Christendom, 
(36) 



0- 



BRIGHTNESS UPON BRIGHTNESS. 37 

in farthest India and flowery Cathay, in Egypt 
and Russia, in Alaska and Georgia, in every speech 
of men, girdling the world ! The tender mercies of 
the heathen and of the besotted by drink and crime 
are cruel, and the lives of children so often utter a 
bitter cry, are so easily snuffed out — what a mercy 
is the evangel of the Gospel of the Christ to such. 
And the heart and the language, the grateful love 
and the joyous elasticity of childhood, are one, the 
world over. 

What the Gospel has done for woman, since the 
Christ spake the emancipating word, is nowhere bet- 
ter seen than in the contrast between a Christian 
and a heathen community, side by side ; between 
the serfdom of the savage, the seraglio of polyg- 
amy whether of Turk or Mormon, and the homes 
of Christendom where woman lights and guards the 
vestal fires, sits at the council table, moves as an 
equal and shares their responsibilities. 

But, as if to make evident that there is no place 
so God-forsaken that the light of the Gospel cannot 
penetrate and brighten it, think what has been done 
to mitigate the horrors of prison confinement, the 
sufferings and the demoralization of war and army 
life, the coarse and brutal conditions of the navvies 
of England, the reclamation of drunkards, gam- 
blers, and fallen women in the great cities of Chris- 
tendom. It is only necessary to mention such 
names as Howard, and Florence Nightingale, and 
Havelock, and Jerry McAuley, each, in his way, 
signally illustrating the possibility of reaching all 
sorts and conditions of men, and putting the di- 



38 BRIGHTENING THE WORLD, 



vine brightness of redeemed manhood into the 
eyes, and hearts, and lives, even of coarse and be- 
sotted folk. 

Their example has been contagious in this, that 
they have never lacked for followers. Seldom has 
a new movement justifying itself as characterized 
by the spirit of the Gospel and results following, 
been allowed to drop to the earth and perish from 
sight. It has held on its way through the outpopu- 
lating power of the Gospel, or been taken up into 
some more approved form of Christian beneficence. 

But quite in another line, and full of promise, 
do we trace the triumph of Christian principles. In 
the steady progress of the laboring classes toward 
a better understanding of themselves and their 
rights, and a more and more intelligent and reason- 
able way — spite of all mistakes and sometimes 
crimes — of urging their cause upon the attention of 
men, we see the silent, though not always recog- 
nized, influence of the Christ. 

This is no less observable in the changed-for- 
the-better attitude of capital toward labor, the great 
and often successful attempts at co-operation and 
profit-sharing, the legislation that protects child- 
hood and women from abuse and secures their 
rights, in the growing demand for arbitration of 
differences, and the bettered condition of working- 
men through shortened hours and better pay and 
cheerier homes. 

Nor is this all. A single number of a current 
magazine. The Century^ for April, 1893, contains sev- 
eral columns given up to recounting the recent ways, 



BRIGHTNESS UPON BRIGHTNESS, 



voluntary and governmental, in which evils have 
been remedied, both to the saving of life and re- 
source, in the interest of workingmen. Best of all, 
the principle is confirmed that to help another is to 
help one's self. One of these brightnesses is the free 
public employment office " supported by the State 
of Ohio in five cities, saving, at least, $100,000 to the 
working people of this commonwealth. The success 
of the experiment ensures its universal adoption. 

Turn the leaf and read how certain employers in 
Germany voluntarily purchased and sold at cost, vast 
quantities of supplies to the sole advantage of the 
employed, besides, in one case, at least, establishing 
a sanitarium in the country for workingmen whose 
health demands a change of air and scene. 

Further on is recounted the governmental super- 
vision of trades dangerous to health, and the reduc- 
tion of the death-rate and loss of time through ill- 
ness. In the case of a single occupation, the loss of 
time through illness was reduced from 4,074 days in 
1885 to 1,003 in 1889 ; to 148 in 1890, and to none 
since May of that year ! In another establishment, 
sick days were reduced in a single year from 2,865 
to 899. 

In another case, an actual profit was made by 
the employer converting a poisonous vapor, disen- 
gaged in manufacturing, and injurious to the work- 
men and to vegetation, into an article of commerce. 

Again, it is found that the fouling of streams by the 
process of manufacturing this and that, can be 
remedied, and, in some cases, a profit made of the 
waste. 



BRIGHTENING THE WORLD. 



On the other hand, attention is called to the fact 
that some employers are still found who refuse the 
relief that a little expense would secure, even when 
it is shown that the neglect so to do is deleterious to 
health and has several times proved fatal, leaving 
helpless families to be cared for by others. The 
mention of such an instance at once provokes a 
righteous resentment of the wrong thus com.mitted, 
which is itself a token of how, in this latter day, the 
applications of the Golden Rule are seen to touch 
the daily round of common life. This is practical 
Christianity ; a thing for which to bless God and 
take courage. 

These are samples only of the way applied Chris- 
tianity is brightening the lot of toiling millions ; and 
if not so rapidly as might be desired, if still huge 
evils and great wrongs exist, it is yet true that we 
have seen rapid strides in our day toward a fairer 
handling of the vital questions of human life. The 
force of all this movement is well expressed by Prin- 
cipal Fairbairn : " The physical condition of large 
masses of men is unfriendly to common morality, 
and whatever is unfriendly to common morality is 
hostile to the achievement of union with God. When 
we raise the physical life of men, give them purer 
air, better water, more w^holesome food, we contrib- 
ute to their chances of moral improvement, and by 
contributing to their chances of moral improvement 
we contribute to the possibility of their Christian 
perfection." This is missionary work with a sound 
ethical basis. It is full of blessed augury that it is 
so seen. 



V. 



THEIR FEWNESS, A MIGHTY HOST. 

What I wish next to emphasize is this : (i.) The 
fewness of the numbers who actually put themselves 
into any given field as the seed of an immortal har- 
vest. Into any heathen land, into any work of re- 
form, into city evangelization, into the reclamation 
of the abandoned, how few, out of the great many, 
have ever lifted their eyes to look, much less gone 
in person, to carry the torch of life. We are amazed 
at the fewness of them, who, at any time, represent 
the hosts of Christendom, <?. g., in any province of 
China, or India, or Japan, in any section of Africa, 
in any group of islands, in any tribe of Indians, in 
any work of reform ! A little handful are planting 
the seed of a great harvest, which multiplies in a 
geometrical ratio. 

(2.) In the face of what opposition the work is al- 
ways carried on. Not only is the latent hostility of 
the sinful heart an element of resistance, but the 
people who live by the existing order of things — the 
medicine-men among the Indians ; the priests of 
temples and shrines who live off the altars of idol- 
atry ; the army who live off the vices and minister to 
the passions of men for gain ; the traffickers in strong 

(41) 



BRIGHTENING THE WORLD. 



drink ; in opium ; the gamblers, the lewd, the dealers 
in temple and altar supplies — all these, of every sort, 
like them who in Ephesus made silver shrines for 
Diana, see the hope of their gains going if the new 
faith comes in, and make relentless war of falsifica- 
tion and violence. 

(3.) There is added to this the defamation of every 
work carried on at a distance from the base line, and 
into which not every one can look. There are many, 
who, selfish themselves, discredit any work of any- 
body that purports to be unselfish — wrought only in 
the spirit of self-sacrifice. The work of the Booths 
of the Salvation Army is discredited by such men, 
because, in their view, nobody being largely trusted 
with benevolent funds, and having an opportunity to 
enrich himself, will fail to do so. The expert commis- 
sion vindicates the Booths and confounds their ene- 
mies, but how long before the costly process will be 
again provoked ? Men who know no law but that 
of self-interest are incapable of understanding the 
higher motive. 

Missionaries are, at heart, the friends of the people 
to whom they go. They side with them against their 
enemies ; especially against sailors, traders, and ad- 
venturers, who come among them to rob and ravish 
the people — the terror of foreign seaports, the shame 
of civilized man. If the Gospel gets a footing and 
rightens the lives of these people, their game of 
riot, greed, and wantonness is over. From such men 
comes the continuous libel of missionaries and their 
work. 

Mr. Charles Darwin said of one set, what holds 



THEIR FEWNESS, A MIGHTY HOST 



43 



equally of many : " The foreign travellers and 
residents in the South Sea Inlands, who write with 
such hostility of missions there, are men who find 
the missionary to be an obstacle to the accomplish- 
ment of their evil purposes." Captains of vessels 
and their crews, who find their carnival of sin inter- 
fered with by the ambassadors of the King of kings, 
in their madness assail the character of men who will 
not be conspirators with them in their iniquitous 
work. 

On the London platform of a great society, Sir 
Arthur Gordon testified that "he had seen the so- 
ciety's missionaries in all parts of the world, and 
had, as he believed, never come across a single mis- 
sionary of it who was not animated by the Spirit, 
and who was not a self-denying man." And the 
Bishop of Mashonaland, after saying that, " there 
seems to be an idea that those who know most about 
missions do not support them," declared his experi- 
ence to be the exact opposite. " Three of the most 
distinguished soldiers in connection with Africa — an 
admiral, a governor, and an administrator, — are the 
class of men who support us in Africa. There is a 
class of men who must be strongly opposed to mis- 
sions — namely, those who bring into these countries 
what must tend to destroy the poor black children * 
body and soul. These men must dislike missions 
with all their hearts ; and it would be well if our 
active opposition to them were even stronger than 
it is. We tamely accept what we hear to the dis- 
paragement of missions without investigating the 
truth. 



BRIGHTENING THE WORLD, 



" More than a year ago, one of the most read of 
London's weekly journals, published a letter 
bringing against an African mission, close to my 
house, a certain definite charge. It was answered 
by our offering to pay all expenses in connection 
with the inquiry, and the value of the time ex- 
pended, if the writer could prove a single instance 
of what he had asserted to happen generally. This 
answer was published in the same paper ; but, from 
that day to this, nothing has been heard of that 
man/* Nor is it likely that anything ever will be. 

The instance is characteristic of a sort of defama- 
tion that is taken up and spread abroad by a press 
hostile to the faith, or ignorant of its spirit and its 
triumphs. And yet the influence of these slanders is 
immense, and it is perennial. They constitute a shel- 
ter for selfishness to flee to, an excuse for indifference 
and covetousness to plead. For men must make peace 
with their conscience, when the world's awful desola- 
tions are before them, when the Macedonian cry is 
heard, when they learn of the faith and zeal of others, 
when asked to lend a hand to a good cause ! They 
must try to believe that the picture is overdrawn ; 
that it is no concern of theirs that whole races swelter 
in their sins ; that it is useless to try to heal this and 
that social evil ; that the money given to missions is 
wasted, and the missionary is a fraud ; that this 
and that work at home is neglected for work at the 
ends of the earth ; that certain classes at home, and 
certain races abroad, are not worth saving ; at any 
rate they cannot go themselves, and as for their 
money they have other uses for it ; that the measure 



THEIR FEWNESS, A MIGHTY HOST. 45 



of other people's doing is no rule for them ; if the 
taste of some runs that way, theirs does not. 

When a good cause is turned empty away by one 
able but unwilling to further it, conscience must be 
settled with, whether the call come from near or 
from far, and these are some of the ways of doing it. 

To be solicitous that the Lord's money be wisely 
invested, and be made to go to the farthest limit of 
usefulness, is but a reasonable exercise of steward- 
ship. To put one's self into this channel of service 
rather than that, to believe that preventive work is 
preferable to rescue work, to prefer Home to Foreign 
Missions, and city missions to either, may not be a 
sm, unless one denies the obligation to do both. 
But to object to this or that as an excuse for doing 
nothing — to find fault with the way things are done, 
and under cover of that, to silence an appeal per- 
sonal, to withhold from all because the calls are so 
many and there is not enough to go around — all 
this is selfish trifling with the solemn obligations of 
discipleship. 

None of these things need concern us much if 
only they were outside the pale of the Christian 
Church. But here are three things, — the world has 
been signally brightened in spots ; the work of a 
few has been signally rewarded ; and the things 
done, the classes and races reached are so signally 
varied, sweeping the whole scale from childhood to 
arrant wickedness of men of corrupt life and hard- 
ened sinfulness, that the world is challenged — 
Show us something too hard for men, going in the 
spirit of Christ, to accomplish — too difficult for 



46 BRIGHTENING THE WORLD. 



united Christendom, if simply loyal to her Lord and 
Master, to effect ! If the few can effect such things 
and so much, what might not be done by a loyal 
church ? The christians of our great cities could 
put the saloons and the pest of shameless vice 
under the ban of popular detestation if, in the spirit 
of the Master, they would unite to do it. The great 
and pressing problem of the relation of Capital to 
Labor, and of Labor to Capital, the christian disci- 
ples of this country are competent to solve when 
they will open their New Testament and ask the 
Holy Spirit to show them the way and agree ^o 
follow. 

What the few elect souls have done, they did, not 
because of their wisdom, or their wit, or their learn- 
ing, though of these they had no lack ; nor because 
of their wealth, for of that, most of them had little. 
The secret of their success was the secret of Paul's. 
They said, "We are not our own, we are bought 
with a price.*' They offered themselves to God to 
be used by Him, and He shone through them, He 
spoke by their lips. He lived in their life, He suffered 
in their self-denials, He loved in their hearts, He 
gave Himself in their sacrifices. They lived over 
again the Christ-life. The Gospel story was made real 
in their life and in their death. Jesus was with them 
as He said. They obeyed His word and they went 
forth to conquer. The cross conquered through 
them. It was the Christ spirit in them going forth 
to the world of need, as Christ Himself left the 
bosom of the Father to bring us back to God. They 



THEIR FEWNESS, A MIGHTY HOST 47 



said to these people of the slums, of India, China, 
and the isles, the white-skinned Caucasian, and they 
of Afric hue, We be all brethren. For us all, the 
Christ was lifted up. We have one Father, and He 
*so loved the world that He gave His only-begotten 
Son, that whosoever believeth on Him might not 
perish, but have everlasting life.' We bring you the 
good news of God." 

The race is yet to be found that is not mov-ed 
by it. The class of sinners from which He has not 
rescued some, cannot be named. From first to last 
it is love that does it, and the language of love is 
sympathy. St. Paul tells its touching story as it 
surged and throbbed in his own soul. " For though 
I was free from all men, I brought myself under 
bondage to all, that I might gain the more. And 
to the Jews I became as a Jew that I might gain 
the Jews ; to them that are under the law, that I 
might gain them that are under the law ; to them 
that are without law, as without law, not being with- 
out law to God, but under the law to Christ, that I 
might gain them that are without law. To the 
weak I became weak, that I might gain the weak ; 
I am become all things to all men, that I may by 
all means save some." It is the law of the king- 
dom. Remember them that are in bonds as bound 
with them," whether they be held in fetters of steel 
or enslaved by their vices, in dungeons of ignorance 
or in prisons of the State, in the meshes of false 
prejudice or the toils of wicked men. This is what 
love prompts to do. " Beloved, if God so loved us, 



48 



BRIGHTENING THE WORLD, 



we ought also to love one another/* Is there any 
getting away from that ought? Can we fail if we 
follow the Divine method ? To the whole Church 
God is saying, by His seal set to the consecration 
of the few — " See what I am waiting to do through 
and by the many. By these brightened spots I 
summon you to brighten others ! " 



VL 



SAVE OTHERS, SAVE THYSELF. 

Doubtless, the impression is abroad that mission- 
ary zeal, of some sort, has become well-nigh univer- 
sal. One needs but to go among the churches— nay, 
but to go up and down the ranks of any considera- 
ble church, to be sadly disabused at this point. He 
will find that it is the few who attend the missionary 
meetings, take and read missionary journals, watch 
the progress of the kingdom, cherish it in their 
orayers, devote their substance to its extension, have 
"heir own little field to righten and brighten. The 
few are making the missionary reputation of the 
churches. He will find the many falling in with the 
prejudices of the outside world, making their slight- 
ing or spiteful remarks of missionaries and mission 
work, dampening the zeal of young souls eager to 
do something for the Master, ignoring the first prin- 
ciples of our Christianity and putting the needs of 
the world outside their practical sympathies. 

This is not an overdrawn sketch. Introduce this 
matter as the family and a few friends draw around 
the fireside, and see what sort of a reception it will 
meet. We have no possible conception what it 
would mean if the whole Church of God were to rise 

(49) 



BRIGHTENING THE WORLD. 



up and put the extension of the Redeemer's king- 
dom to the fore in the plans and aims of life. But 
what does our discipleship mean, if not this ? Who 
is it that bids us " Seek first the kingdom of God 
and His righteousness"? Who taught us to pray, 
^' Thy kingdom come " ? Who is it that says to every 
disciple entering His service — Go, preach my Gos- 
pel to every creature " ? It is a commission for the 
near and for the remote, the city, the frontier, the ends 
of the earth. It is all-inclusive — every creature/' 

Nobody has confessed the Lord Jesus who did 
not, at the same time, obligate himself to loyalty 
and obedience. Whatsoever ye do in word or 
deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus." It cov- 
ers the broad belt of human life, and lays its con- 
straint — the most potent moral constraint in the 
universe, the love of Christ — upon the man of learn- 
ing, the man of affairs, the man of ten talents and 
the man of one, to make him a fellow-worker with 
God in the recovery of this world. . 

"We are finding you out," said a Brahman to a 
missionary. " You are not as good as your Book. 
If you were as good as your Book you would con- 
quer India for Christ in five years." So the story 
goes. Fact or fable, it tells a truth of the Church 
of God. She is not as good as her Book. The 
ideal is always ahead of us. The saintliest of the 
elect who have gone through the world with Christ- 
like yearning consuming their souls — Brainard, 
Martyn, Judson, Patteson, Muller, elect w^omen not 
a few, like the chiefest of apostles, never dreamed 
that they were as good as their Book. 



SAVE OTHERS, SAVE THYSELF, 



51 



But this much the latest comer, and the weakest in 
intelligence and faith, can do. They can take up the 
principles of primitive Christianity, apart from all tra- 
ditions of men. They can sit at the feet of the Christ 
to learn His will. They can drink of His spirit at the 
fountain-head, and deliberately, with all their heart, 
set themselves to some work for the Master, commen- 
surate with their ability, to brighten this lost world 
by rightening its wrongs and saving its lost ones. 
Begin with some boy of the street, some class in the 
school, some home of poverty and sin, some measure 
of public beneficence, some boy or girl to be edu- 
cated for the Church, some one to be sent to whom 
the Master says: " Go ! " 

Bring the littles of the poor and put them together 
for some great work. Hear a missionary in China 
say how sixty persons giving two cents a day each 
can annually reach, through a native preacher, 50,000 
souls. How five such societies actually do support 
a floating chapel and dispensary, a Christian doc- 
tor and two native preachers, who, in two months, 
preached in a hundred villages and gave medical 
aid to more than a thousand persons ! Let the rich 
support a mission, build churches, found a college, 
do the great things to which God, in His providence, 
calls them. This is precisely what discipleship 
means. And we of this latter day have, not only 
the Master's "Lo! I am with you alway," and the 
marching orders, Go, preach," upon which the 
primitive Church went forth to an untried work ; 
but we have the annals of all the Christian centu- 
ries, the soul-bracing conquests of the last hundred 



52 BRIGHTENING THE WORLD. 



years, and the story of the current press, ever with 
something new to tell of how humanity, here and 
there, was touched in Christian love, and fountains 
sprang up in the desert; the wilderness was glad. 

Nor have we simply to consider a very wide and 
grave defection in the Church from the first princi- 
ples of the Gospel as it affects the world, and delays 
the day of the Lord," leaving vast m.ultitudes 
to grope on in darkness and in sin that might be 
rejoicing in the light — themselves saved, in turn to 
brighten others, if the Church did her duty. 

The very serious question is thrust upon us. What 
is to become of them who thus turn away from their 
obvious duty and sacred privilege thus to follow and 
publish the Christ ? No matter what the motive, 
there cannot be a good one. This is of the very 
essence of discipleship. To do otherwise is to deny 
the Lord. It is more. Save thy life, lose thyself ; 
lose thy life, save thyself. 

It is the grain of wheat that falls into the ground 
and dies, that lives and yields a hundred fold. It is 
the life given in self-sacrifice that exults in the 
love and joy of God Almighty. It is being like 
God, and this is to drink of the river of His pleas- 
ures. 

The employer of labor who looks well to the in- 
terests of his workmen cares best for his own. A 
selfish capitalist is not only a mean man; he is an 
unwise man. Live a self-centred life and shrivel. 
Live a God-centred life and grow and shine. Draw 
within your own shell, shut the world out, nurse your 
wrongs, cultivate what are vainly called your own 



SAVE OTHERS, SAVE THYSELF, 53 



interests, live unto yourself, and be miserable. Go 
out of self, forget yourself, meet the world, bless the 
world, live for others, seeking for them what God 
says they and we all most need, and summer in His 
smile and reflect His goodness. 

There are some who, indeed, live for others, and 
a sore travail of spirit it is both for themselves 
and the others, for their ambition moves in the 
plane of the world, and they only fret themselves 
and destroy whom they are mistakenly seeking to 
serve. Many are they thus carnally ambitious, who 
come back from their weary quest disquieted in 
spirit, at odds with God, themselves, and the world, 
filled with their own devices. Be a dispenser of 
divine benefits, a preacher of the kingdom of 
heaven ; let the love of the world perish within 
thee, cease to kick against the pricks, do the will of 
God and see how quickly He will fill your soul with 
a benediction, your arms with sheaves. 

There is nothing that pays like self-forgetful ser- 
vice for others. There is nothing so lean of reward 
as self-seeking, both in present satisfaction and di- 
vine award. " There is no man that hath left house, 
or brethren, or sisters, or mother, or father, or chil- 
dren, or lands, for my sake and the Gospel's, but he 
shall receive a hundred-fold now, in this time ; 
houses, and brethren, and sisters, and mothers, and 
children, and lands, with persecutions ; and in the 
world to come eternal life." A hundred-fold now^ 
with persecutions, and m spite of them. That mag- 
nificent promise is as broad as the needs of human 
life, and as sure as the Master's word can make it. 



54 BRIGHTENING THE WORLD. 



Do we believe it ? They believed it who went forth 
in faith to reclaim the desert and subdue the wilder- 
ness of moral desolation. They preached from the 
cross of Divine love a Gospel of repentance that broke 
up the stubborn soil. The good seed of the kingdom 
was sown. It was fertilized by the dews of God's 
grace, and faithfully tended by His servants; and 
lo ! the wilderness is glad, and so are they — the 
happiest people in the world. The less of self, the 
more of God. The more like Him, the larger access 
to the hearts of men, the richer the inheritance of 
love and gratitude, of contentment and peace ; "for 
whosoever would save his life shall lose it ; and 
whosoever shall lose his life for my sake and the 
Gospel's shall save it." 

It is as true of churches as of individuals. The 
Moravians date from 1732 their evangelizing work. 
They are said to have sent out missionaries, one for 
every sixty of their members. Their evangelized 
native churches number ninety thousand members, 
three times as many as the home churches, and they 
raise two-thirds of their total income of $350,000. 
They are a poor folk, but the banner missionary 
church of the world. Protestant churches send out 
one in five thousand of their members and reap 
proportionally less. 

In less than eighty years thirty thousand mission- 
ary Baptists have grown to over three millions; 
while forty thousand anti-mission Baptists have 
grown to only forty-five thousand. " I do not know," 
says one, *'what there would have been in the Bap- 
tist denomination if there had been no Baptist mis- 



SAVE OTHERS, SAVE THYSELF. 



sion. It was the real source of inspiration to the 
churches/' Such testimony can be multiplied in- 
definitely; but let us seize the principle — save others, 
save thyself. It has been well said : " We hold that 
no people will ever keep up its character at its high- 
est level — keep it noble, in fact — unless it imposes 
upon itself some task requiring energy, and self- 
sacrifice, and patience, for the benefit of the world. 
There must be something big, of some sort, which 
it has to do, which does not pay directly, but which, 
consciously or unconsciously, it insists on doing, 
even to its immediate detriment/' 

Assuredly this is true. Empty hands, petty enter- 
prises, neither ennoble individuals nor churches. 
" Israel is an empty vine ; he bringeth forth fruit un- 
to himself." Desiring that His Church should be a 
noble church, as well as the light of the world, the 
Master laid upon her this Divine work — the noblest 
of earth, the greatest, the toughest, the most tasking 
to faith — which bids her ever keep in touch with 
the resurrection might of her risen Lord, and con- 
quer ; conquer only thus, and then, shine forth as 
the sun. 

These chapters furnish an answer to the inquiry — 
Can it be done ? We have singled out, here and 
there, a case in evidence from the treasure-house of 
fact, accumulating for a century — yea, since Pente- 
cost. If the world can be whitened in spots, why 
not till the spots all run together, in islands and 
continents of light ? If a few have done such great 
things and notable, what might not be wrought if 
every man who has taken on himself the vows of 



56 BRIGHTENING THE WORLD, 



loyalty to Jesus, the king, would do his simple duty ? 
We call this a missionary age. As compared with its 
forerunners it may be. As compared with what 
it might be, it is less than half alert and aflame. 
There is still a vast deal of apathy and unbelief ; al- 
most enough to provoke a blast from Gabriel's 
trump. And yet, every victory like these named, at 
home, abroad ; like that of the Canadian Mackay in 
Formosa — thrilling tale of consecration rewarded ; 
or that of the Baptists among the Teloogoos, of the 
Presbyterians in Northern China, of the American 
Churches in Japan, of McAll in Paris ; every such 
victory is a confirmation of the Gospel of the resur- 
rection, upon which we have embarked all that is 
precious and immortal in heart or hope. Is it a 
light matter that we have this confirmation ? 

If it is a sin and a shame to question whether this 
or that people can be won, this or that cancerous 
sore be healed, it is scarcely for the believer a mat- 
ter of wonder that the greatest of these works of 
mercy are true. For this Gospel which these men 
took abroad is "the power of God unto salvation to 
every one that believeth." It is the forth-putting 
of God's power in the way of salvation and uplift. 
They were not all gifted or brilliant people, but they 
took out a great Gospel ; and it has been well said 
that "a small man with a great Gospel will do more 
execution than a great man with a small Gospel." 
These are not the triumphs of a Unitarian Liberal- 
ism, but of a Gospel of forgiveness through Jesus, 
the Christ — the crucified and the risen One ; the 



SAVE OTHERS, SAVE THYSELF. 



only Gospel that is declared to be " mighty through 
God to the pulling down of strongholds." 

Have ye received the Holy Ghost since ye be- 
lieved ? Is the pessimism that says the world can- 
not be brightened, and the selfishness that does not 
want it rightened, except enough to make it safe, 
begotten of the spirit of Him who "will have all 
men come to the knowledge of the truth " ? O right- 
ened man, set thyself to some task of rightening 
others, lest thine own righteousness perish out of 
thee, by being severed from Him who knew no law 
but that of love, no life but that of sacrifice ! 



VII. 



WHERE TO BEGIN AND HOW TO GO ON. 



I.— THE HOME— FEED ITS FIRES AND FIGHT 
ITS FOES. 

To brighten this world, begin at Jerusalem — at 
the home. To have been the creator of a pure, sen- 
sible, Christian home is to deserve well of mankind ; 
is to have materially aided in the regeneration of the 
world. Were all homes such, brightness and glad- 
ness would be universal. This is by no means an 
easy-going achievement, and the failures are many 
even where the purpose is good. Failures multiply 
where the conception of what a true home means is 
dim, or no serious attempt to realize it is made. 
Over vast areas of this world the thing is wholly un- 
known, or barely rudimentary in form. Everywhere 
is it menaced by a host of foes. 

But God has set the children of men in families. 
This is His ideal of life for this world. The funda- 
mental principle is that which unites one man and 
one woman in indissoluble wedlock. Affection is the 
uniting bond. Life begins in the family. Here it 
is sheltered and nourished. Character is formed, 
habits are taken on, and the aims of life get their 
direction. The family, by itself, is a little common- 
(58) 



WHERE TO BEGIN AND HOW TO GO ON, 59 



wealth. The State is an aggregation of families. 
Family life gives character and tone to Church and 
State. They are the stream of which this is the 
fountain. 

It follows that this world can never be brightened 
while the family is degraded and the average stand- 
ard of family life is low. One of the worst conceiv- 
able fruits of slavery on this continent was its wanton 
disregard of the sacredness of the family relation. 
Its entail of loose ethics, and lax restraints upon the 
intercourse of men and women, is a menace to the 
well-being of millions of people, to one-tenth of 
the population of these United States. Polygamy 
and polyandry, wherever they exist, are full of 
misery and moral debasement. 

One of the first tokens of the regeneration of a 
race or people, when Christianity touches it, is 
seen in the separation of families from the com- 
mon herd. For Christianity stands for the family 
and the home. It makes both sacred by sanctifying 
wedlock, and furnishes at once the ideal and the 
motive for their highest perfection. What the fam- 
ily and the home shall be, rests chiefly with its united 
head. It is for them, by mutual concessions and 
fidelity to marriage vows, first of all to perpetuate 
the family, till death dissolves the bond. The sig- 
nificance of such an example is emphasized in an 
age of loose notions and reckless practice as to di- 
vorce. At such a time society becomes ungirt, and 
the sundering of marriage ties almost contagious. 
The sight of an *asy way out, such as our courts fur- 
nish, weakens the purpose to bear and forbear, to 



6o 



BRIGHTENING THE WORLD, 



strive together to better a condition that has become 
difficult, and by a larger charity to find the way of 
better judgments and less of friction in the conduct 
of life. 

Were marriage, at the outset, seen to be the serious 
matter that it is, and entered upon after due consid- 
eration, and with pure, unselfish intent, there would 
be far less of recourse to the courts to end what has 
solemnly been united for life under the seal of both 
Church and State. 

As it is, with the prevalence of hasty and ill- 
considered marriages, the alternative of divorce 
from a relation thought to be tolerable no longer, 
might be found in an honest attempt to search 
out and remove the causes of alienation. While 
Christianity counsels to this end and furnishes the 
motive to make the effort, and sustains the spirit 
under difficulty, the State, which was jointly respon- 
sible for the union, defeats its intent by opening an 
easy way out. This has at last become scandalous, 
and the frightful increase of divorce calls loudly for 
legislation, uniform throughout the country, making 
it difficult to sever a relation, which, if not meant to 
be permanent, is immoral. 

But there is also, and quite as seriously to be con- 
sidered, the life of the family as a school of training 
for after life. These children of sin and shame, 
through what gap in the family nurture did they come 
to this ? For lack of what were they left to fall so low ? 
Those whom the world delights to honor, almost 
with one voice are speaking of the homes that 
nurtured them into greatness and set them on their 



WHERE TO BEGIN AND HOW TO GO ON. 6l 



upward way. T/ie makers of the futwe of the world 
are being trai7ied in the households of to-day. They 
will make it grand and glorious, if the household 
life is noble and pure, unselfish and true. They will 
unmake and mar the good already done, if this life 
is weak, foolish, and wicked. The habits and traits 
of the home will reproduce themselves in the young 
lives there being nurtured. It is, therefore, not sur- 
prising — it is, indeed, to be commended — that many 
mothers consider that what they do for the world 
must chiefly be done through their homes ; that they 
can best multiply their influence for good by train- 
ing their children to lead useful and noble lives. No 
service rendered the public can possibly compensate 
for failure in the home. 

But to do that work well one needs to be in touch 
with the noblest movements of the time. For one's 
own sake, no less, for the sake of the young life 
growing up around one, there must needs be the 
broad outlook upon life and the warmest sympathy 
with the world's claims, the weak upon the strong, 
the poor upon the rich, the heathen upon the gos- 
pelized, or the noble thing sought, and, in a way, 
desired, will not issue from that devotion. 

The home may easily degenerate into a thing selfish 
and exclusive. No family liveth unto itself. Devotion 
to the family life and the appointments of home can 
ill afford to dispense with high ideals and a careful 
study of the tendencies of things allowed. Devotion 
so-called, to the home, may lead out into extrava- 
gance, into demands that cannot be honestly met, 
into an unhealthy emulation and striving for things 



62 BRIGHTENING THE WORLD, 



beyond one*s reach, all which has, times without 
number, wrecked the family life. It has laid tasks 
upon the provider that could not be carried and 
driven him to bankruptcy or to crime. A healthy 
spirit of contentment, that makes the best and most 
of available resources, and daily teaches the lesson 
of cheerful frugality, finds within limited possibilities 
abundant material for happiness and thrift, and is the 
best possible atmosphere in which to strengthen the 
marital bond and train childhood for the vicissitudes 
of life. A restless, feverish ambition and love of 
display in the mother heart, or a cold, selfish, miser- 
ly spirit in the man who has taken it upon himself 
to be a husband and a father, will in either case neu- 
tralize almost any amount of so-called devotion. 

There are certain recognized and outstanding foes 
of the family and of the home, grim with age and 
reeking with spoil, which yet are often cherished in 
the face of an open record of disaster through cen- 
turies of time. To these let us give heed. 

(a). One of these foes is Licentiousness. Upon this we 
do not dwell further than to say, that nothing strikes 
so fell a blow, or makes so wanton an assault upon the 
very existence of the family, and of families that 
presumably are to be. This is a foe that invades all 
classes of society. It stalks up the best avenues 
with as unblushing an affront as it wears in the 
humbler streets and alleys. The social evil is a tan- 
gible witness both to the fact and to the extent of 
it. The divorce court is another. The bitterness, 
the humiliation, the tears, entailed by this monster 
vice fill the unwritten history of many a home 



WHERE TO BEGIN AND HO IV TO GO ON, 63 



on which rests the blight that is seldom lifted. 
Coupled with luxury, no nation of the past has been 
able to withstand the emasculating, demoralizing 
curse. This is a matter that needs to be met in the 
home by purity of example on the one hand, and by 
discreet training of children in respect to all natural 
appetites and passions, on the other. 

(b). Another of these foes is Gambling, It has been 
said that there is a gambling element in human 
nature " that needs to be watched and suppressed, 
not encouraged. That such an element of weakness 
exists, probably every mature person has found out 
for himself. To stake something upon a game of 
chance, a throw of the dice, a turn of a wheel, the 
speed of a horse, the contingency of the market, 
upon the probabilities of other men meeting their 
engagements, in the hope of getting something for 
nothing, is a thing so common that it may be truly 
said society is infected by it. The wholly clean 
of it constitute the exception, not the rule. The ef- 
fect of this upon the individual, upon industry, and 
reliance upon stable methods of business for getting 
on in the world, creating feverish expectations 
doomed to disappointment, is destructive not only 
of peace of mind, but ultimately of self-respect, 
often leading to madness and self-destruction. 

The extent of this evil cannot be measured. The 
great fight with the Louisiana lottery unearthed the 
wide ramification of this form of the evil into every 
city and hamlet of the country, raking in the hard- 
earned money of every sort of wage-earner. The un- 
counted gambling and pool rooms of cities and vil- 



64 BRIGHTENING THE WORLD. 



lages, the habitual practice of multitudes of staking 
treats upon the throw of the dice, the betting craze, 
the guessing craze, the magnificent risks of Wall 
Street and the exchanges of the country, and of the 
famous gambling centres of the world — these all 
proclaim the widespread contagion which in one 
way or another reaches almost every home in the 
land, and means disaster to multitudes. 

We would scarce expect such an evil as this to be 
openly encouraged in the home which has in hand 
the future of the world. Here is the place to throttle 
theseyoung serpents whose sting, at length, is deadly. 
Of what use, at great cost, to whip the lottery out of 
New Orleans, its feeble imitations out of the churches, 
technical gambling out of its dens, if we and our 
children are to countenance the same thing in stores 
and shops, supposedly of good repute, and spice our 
purchases of confectionery and dry-goods with a 
share in a lottery, and perhaps get a watch, an ass, 
or an ostrich ? Trade is belittled and the conscience 
debauched by such methods. The street becomes a 
school of vice, and the home a small arena infected 
with the spirit of gambling. 

And what shall be said, what can be said, in 
justification of the card-playing of these latter 
days, which has converted so many homes into 
gambling parlors, the progressive-euchre parties, 
in some towns, in some localities in cities, becom- 
ing an absorbing craze, arresting the attention, 
and invading to their detriment all the serious 
relations of life and the very Church of God ? It is 
not card-playing for a little amusement of which I 



WHERE TO BEGIN AND HO W TO GO ON, 65 



speak, it is playing for a wager of cash, or other 
valuable articles or perquisites, which spice the 
game, and introduce into it the very essence of 
gambling. This is true however trivial the wager. 
Women are reported as wearing their spoils in the 
shape of costly garments, or out of them decorat- 
ing their houses with articles of vertu, sometimes 
furnishing them substantially. Money that was 
sacred to the uses of the home has been put in jeop- 
ardy and lost. This is costly sport, as all immor- 
ality is. 

It is affirmed that "gambling is the growing 
epidemic of the day." And this invasion of the 
homes of the country, for the most part unrebuked, 
is a sign of the times not to be complacently re- 
garded. With such an example in the sanctuary of 
the home, it is not to be wondered at that our young 
men so very generally are gamblers in a petty way, 
making their small stakes for cigars, drinks, or 
lunches, every now and then to break out into a de- 
falcation and land some son of promise in the felon's 
cell, and cover some family with shame ! In one es- 
tablishment, higher than the average, it was said by 
a responsible member of the firm, that there, the boys 
gambled away their week's wages before it was 
earned. Surely our homes ought to be purged of this 
thing and of every semblance of it, if we indeed 
care for the future of our children. A nation of 
gamblers is fit for no great mission in this world. It 
can be neither right nor bright. 

Rather than that this state of things should con- 
tinue, it were a wholesome object-lesson if all the 



66 BRIGHTENING THE WORLD. 



spoils of progressive-euchre could be gathered in 
the open market-place and committed to the flames, 
in token of its utter clearance from the home-life of 
this land. Our homes cannot be tainted in any way 
with the spirit of gambling except to their harm. 
And how can we fight this hydra-headed evil out- 
side, in the colleges and in the business houses, in 
the saloons and the pool-rooms, in the avowed 
gambling-hells, and in every form of masked devil- 
try, if we do not forbid its entrance into the sanc- 
tities of home life? Certainly, these practices ill 
comport with devotion to the making of a true home. 

(c). Another foe is the Drink Habit. Probabl}^ no 
foe of the home will be recognized as more ruthless 
than this. Drink and drunkenness are responsible 
for more domestic misery than any other evil that 
afflicts society. We have no gauge v/ith which to 
measure it. The responsibility for it rests largely, 
though not exclusively, upon men. Drink has first 
mastered the will, then crippled the business value 
of a man's services, made him uncertain and unre- 
liable, then wasteful, then disheartened, then reck- 
less, then debased, then cruel, then a terror — and all 
this heads up in the home ! When the wife is thus 
mastered, or when both are involved, the tragic 
misery is heightened. Nor does it end with them- 
selves, if children are the fruit of their marriage. 
Nobody can tell where it will end, or whether it will 
ever end. But here we are, face to face with a foe 
of family life ; and so of every other interest of so- 
ciety, the fruitful source of divorces, of poverty, 
pauperism, and crime, of misery that often endures, 



WHERE TO BEGIN AND HOW TO GO ON, 6/ 



rather than shake off an encumbrance, through the 
allotted age of man. 

Does drink ever brighten a home ? It is said, for 
an hour, to promote sociability and hilarity, but will 
the history of the matter, fully writ — the outcome of 
the drinking habits, even of the most select circles, 
fully told — bear record that lives and homes have 
thus been brightened ? The medicinal use of wine 
or strong drink is not here in hand. This belongs, 
if anywhere, at home and at meals, and can be so 
understood, and yield no evil result with the right- 
minded. But the medicinal use does not cover so- 
cial drinking, habitual drinking, tippling at bars and 
club-rooms, and at meetings of friends. In such 
places the wine-glass is inverted by such as wish 
their influence counted against the most insidious 
foe of family life and social purity. 

Ought not the home to be safeguarded against such 
a foe ? Can there be safety in any other, at most, 
but the medicinal use of stimulants? As father, or 
mother, or both, your habitual use of them will not 
stop with yourselves. Suppose they can be safely in- 
dulged by you, the risk is greater with your child — 
the probabilities against the next generation are 
greater than against you. Some things can be almost 
or quite scientifically demonstrated; and both science 
and experience testify against the habitual use of 
stimulants. Children, if they go to school, are now 
happily to be taught the exact facts in the case. And 
if the home, by example and object-lesson, teaches 
the same thing, there is a great probability that the 
children of that home will grow up with a healthy 



68 BRIGHTENING THE WORLD. 



aversion to stimulants and with a body free from 
such cravings as often have driven men against their 
sober judgment into paths of dissipation. What a her- 
itage is this to come into. It is itself, wealth untold. 

A household so ordered will not be likely to fur- 
nish stimulants on festive occasions, to tempt other 
people's children into dangerous paths. It were bet- 
ter to break the decanter than to break the heart of 
another, to shatter the wine-cellar than the fabric of 
one's own or another's home. Doubtless some will 
prefer to take the risk, rather than the temperance 
role, but note, they take a risk: a risk that concerns 
what is dear to them and to others, as life ; a risk, 
instead of a certainty. Is that wisdom ? This is 
said calmly, judicially said in the face of the evident 
tendency, even in the best of families, to bring back 
the decanter to the daily board, and to furnish wine 
on social occasions, and the notorious mischief of 
the club-house. 

Temperance reform must have its stronghold in 
the home, or be driven from the field. In the homes 
of the Church of God it must find its fortress of 
supremest strength, or be Vv^ithout muniments of 
power. 

(d). Another foe of the home is weak, unseasonable, or 
wicked literature. To keep clear of all this is well- 
nigh impossible. This age of the press works off 
with the good a vast deal of evil. Under the guise 
of literature every evil imagination, every corrupt 
doctrine, every deceptive and tempting lure, clothes 
itself. Every sort of faith or phase of infidelity 
makes literature its servant for reaching the people. 



WHERE TO BEGIN AND HO W TO GO ON, 69 



Every sort of imposture, or speculative venture, or 
wind-blown scheme for suddenly amassing a fortune, 
comes noiselessly to our homes in the printed page. 

We have to watch, not only against the evil, thinly 
disguised or openly scattered, but we cannot be 
certain of everything that comes with an air of sanc- 
tity about it. The literature that finds its w^ay into 
our homes needs to be watched. Not every well- 
meaning person, writing for children, writes sense 
and wisdom. The stories most read by the legion 
of novel-readers are not calculated to ennoble life, 
and stimulate sound sentiments. The doctrinaire 
that aims to teach the way to the golden age, when 
capital and labor shall lie down together, as yet 
oftener misses than hits the mark, sometimes aug- 
ments the trouble he thinks to allay. Omnivorous 
reading is mischievous. Fortunately there is no lack 
of clean and good, interesting and instructive, enter- 
taining and amusing reading, only we must be at 
pains to secure it. 

The blanket-sheet Sunday newspaper literature, 
always unseasonable, often vicious and wholly un- 
necessary, for families who do not want to see the 
Lord's day robbed of its sanctity, and who believe 
that the old-fashioned habit of church-going is a 
thing worth cultivating, ought to be discarded. The 
unsought opinion of one of the strongest and best 
known of the legal profession, that the Sunday news- 
paper is the great foe of attendance upon church, 
is worthy of attention. Omnipresent and omnipo- 
tent as the Sunday newspaper has become, it cannot 
quite supply the place of preacher, choir, and sane- 



BRIGHTENING THE WORLD. 



tuary, of worship and ethical instruction and Gospel 
tidings of good cheer — especially for that remnant 
of society who want one day in seven different from 
the rest, and see enough to more than satisfy them, 
of advertisements, of records of crime and riot, of 
city and national exploit, six days in the week, to 
be glad of an interval to think of something else. 
Anyhow, if our homes are to be centres of bright, 
pure, healthy life, we must have some care what lit- 
erature comes into them. 

(e). In like manner do amusements need to be guarded 
against abuse. They stand on much the same foot- 
ing as literature. They are abundant and of all sorts. 
We must choose for ourselves and for our children — 
choose, we ought, in such a way as to be justified in 
the healthy outcome both of physique and character, 
realizing that play is for life's diversion, not its sta- 
ple or its end. The place to begin in this, as in all 
things else, is at home. The battle of life is really 
fought out at home. Destiny is usually being deter- 
mined under the roof that shelters our childhood 
and our youth. And the question is : Shall our 
amusements be highly seasoned or sober, exciting 
or quiet, involve late hours or seasonable, have or 
have not strict regard to their ethical bearings and 
tendencies. As we answer we go. For there are 
these two sorts, whatever may lie between. 

In our day, and very generally too, the doctrine 
of the temperate use of anything, not positively 
immoral, has become popular and has its able advo- 
cates. And so, what our fathers eschewed, and the 
churches universally frowned upon, are now as cer- 



WHERE TO BEGIN AND HOW TO GO ON. 71 



tainly in vo^ue, in the church and out of it, though 
the tendencies of these things is in no whit changed 
for the better. Card-playing is more mischievous 
because of its association with gambling that once 
was eschewed. The dance is just what it always 
was. The theatre likewise. To the question, Does 
the theatre, as it is, and all in all, make for or 
against, strengthen or weaken, the bonds, the ends, 
and the supreme interests of a true home and a 
Christian life ? thoughtful people can give but one 
answer. 

The same serious folk justify their patronage 
of the theatre on the ground of picking and choos- 
ing, here and there, thereby condemning the rest, 
as they must, if their ethical standard is worthy 
of respect. The apologists for the theatre, and for 
the church siding with it, make much of Mr. Booth, 
Mr. Jefferson, and a few women who have dignified 
and ennobled the stage, being themselves people of 
quality. But what are these among so many ? And 
how slowly, alas, their kind grows ! And how select 
their audience — the very few out of the untold mul- 
titude. Theoretically the argument for temperance 
in all things is plausible. In practice it fails for nine 
out of ten who attempt to walk out on it. One does 
not need to do more than walk the streets with eyes 
open to judge of the theatre as most cities know it. 
What can be gotten out of it to keep childhood 
sweet and pure, our youth manly, strong, and Chris- 
tian, to make parents better fitted for the duties of 
the home, it is hard to discover. Surely in a day 
like this, when the means and resources of enter- 



72 



BRIGHTENING THE WORLD, 



tainment are so many and varied, and tireless inven- 
tion brings out each day something new, that is not 
a hard lot from which is ruled out the objectionable 
and the hazardous. 

Nor does this bode ill for the good cheer, the 
strong, joyous, healthy life of the homes that thus 
circumscribe their joys Is it thought, taking the 
long view of life that reaches to the end of it, 
where it welds, without lapping, on to the invisi- 
ble and eternal, that there is really anything to 
be discounted, where the high seasoning of ques- 
tionable arts and the gratification of treacherous 
appetites are severely let alone ? Surely the advan- 
tage is not all and altogether with us moderns in our 
more latitudinarian times. Are we growing a nobler 
sort of men ? Are we better filling the high places 
of trust? Are our politics cleaner? Is our piety 
more trustworthy ? In some things we surely do 
weigh more. In others, we as certainly are found 
wanting. Be ye fully persuaded in your own minds. 

There is no w^ish, by these pages, to curtail the in- 
nocent joys of any man, or divert from any home any 
least rivulet that is bearing in upon it irrigating 
waters. But, while we feed the fires, we must fight 
the foes of our homes. Some of them are so well 
known, their record is so detestable, that the thought 
that they may cross our threshold and darken our 
doors, or lay their polluting touch upon our inno- 
cents or our strong ones, is unbearable. And yet 
they come under such specious disguises and with 
such flattering arts, that often the mischief is done 
before our unwitting eyes. Our homes need, first of 



WHERE TO BEGIN AND HO W TO GO ON. 73 



all, to be Christian. To own one master only and 
one law of life. Intrenched they are, not by the arts 
of men, but only in the Christ. We put our chil- 
dren in His arms, no one forbidding. We would 
fain lead our youth along the paths trod by His 
harmless feet to a manhood as noble, as unselfish, as 
His. 

We would have our homes like that blest one at 
Bethany so often cheered by His presence. They 
need not be elegant in the arts of refinement ; they 
need not be housed in marble ; they need not be 
arrayed in purple or fine linen ; they need not fare 
sumptuously every day — these dear ones of our 
homes— but they need to be true, and gentle, and 
kind, and loving, considerate of others, hating every 
false way, unselfish, and Christlike. Our homes 
need to be frugal, industrious, the centres of use- 
ful life, wise in the use of much or little, hospit- 
able, and unbarred to this world's great, crying 
needs. 

This cannot be if we let loose the baser pas- 
sions of our nature, if we let in the demon of 
drink, the devil of chance, and put no guard over 
the literature we read, and the amusements we 
approve. Some of these things never come alone. 
Most of these foes are really adepts in each other's 
arts. Lewdness does not go alone, nor drink, noi 
gambling ; and these all know the way where sport 
becomes vulgar and literature profane. 

After all, if we will, they who are for us are more 
than they that be against us. And home life, strong, 
beautiful, and true, is no novelty. We may aspire 



BRIGHTENING THE WORLD, 



to it, reach out after it, and account that to realize 
its ideal is a fine art, and the school of its Master is 
open to us all. Old-fashioned people, some later 
born, will be glad to be reminded of Burns' " Cot- 
ter's Saturday Night," and the peace that fell upon 
that home of prayer, nor wonder that he sings : 

From scenes like these old Scotia's grandeur springs, 
That makes her loved at home, revered abroad." 



VIII. 



HOME, TENEMENT, AND SALOON. 

Miss Octavia Hill, out of a long experience in 
brightening the homes of the poor, writes : " In my 
estimation the work most needed now is in the 
homes of the people. Those who are deeply im- 
bued with the spirit of family life are those who 
best help the poor. In this spirit they meet on the 
great human ground, older than theories of equal- 
ity, safer than our imaginings of fresh arrange- 
ments for the world, and fitter to inspire the noblest 
and the simplest sense of duty. 

"This I will say, that the deep honor for home life 
is essential to the best kind of work for the poor. 
Thrift ? Yes, if you like. Education ? Yes, if it is 
good. Preparing girls for service, sanitary improve- 
ment, skilled nursing, country holidays, amuse- 
ments, drill, open spaces, and fifty more things — 
all are valuable ; but one spark of honor for and 
love of home, and sense of duty therem, if it were 
granted you to fan it into life, would be a better 
gift one more far reaching in its influence, and 
bearing better fruit, without which all the other 
gifts are very poor, with which they will bring much 
good." 

■ (75) 



;6 BRIGHTENING THE WORLD. 



This accords with the emphasis here put on the 
home, — nor one's own only. Doubtless, of the 
things to be done, if this world is to be brightened, 
to order one's own life aright, and, if the respon- 
sible head of a family, to endeavor to realize the 
idea of a pure, true home, lie first in one's path. 
But this is by no means the sum of obligation. 
The duties that grow out of society instantly con- 
front us. For there is a body politic as well as a 
body individual, — a world that lies in wickedness 
as well as a kingdom of righteousness set up in the 
midst. And these twain hold very definite relations 
to each other that cannot be ignored. 

I myself, and this family of mine, however true our 
ideals and aims, are not to hold our own, even, simply 
caring for ourselves. If our environment is evil, we 
will be affected by it, whether it consist of a mala- 
rious belt at our back-door, or an evil-minded 
neighborhood on all sides. Caring only for our- 
selves, our children will be caught in it, our sanc- 
tuary of home will be invaded by it. I am obliged, 
though caring only for my own, to inquire, Who 
and what is my neighbor? What sort of a ward or 
city is this in which I am living ? Lot, caring only 
for himself, will find Sodom too much for him. If 
he will save himself, he must turn missionary. 

Even this kingdom of righteousness, conceived of 
as simply trying to hold its owm, will be clambered 
over, invaded and dishonored by omnipotent and ag- 
gressive wickedness, or stand like the pretentious fig- 
tree, crowned with leaves, — leaves only,as do some of 
the Oriental churches, which bear the name of the 



HOME, TENEMENT, AND SALOON. 



Christ, perennial only in forms and ceremc»nies. As 
answering to its spirit, no such an idea is permitted to 
linger around this kingdom or to hover in the air. 
" Ye are the light of the world, the salt of the earth." 
Like the mustard-seed, that becomes the greatest of 
herbs ; like the leaven that pervades the whole 
lump, is this kingdom — powerfully, persistently ag- 
gressive. Go out into the highway and the hedges 
and constrain them to come in. Go ye, preach, 
teach all nations. It is the law of the kingdom and 
Its life. It must conquer or be conquered. 

The law for the individual is no less explicit. 
Let your light shine. Be not conformed to this 
world. Look not every man on his own things, but 
every man also on the things of others. Lose thy 
life , save thy life Hide thy talent ; no increase, 
no reward. Nay, take away from him that which 
he hath. Give it to him that knows best how to 
use talents. The man who is living to please him- 
self represents not the kingdom of Heaven, what- 
ever else he may. He who is saying, " May not a 
man do what he will with his ow^n ? " has yet to 
learn that he himself is not his own, but bought 
with a price , that he is put in trust, with everything 
that the law recognizes as his, and for the best use of 
it for the best ends, he is held responsible as a 
steward for God. All this is elementary Gospel 
truth. What the true disciple wants to know is 
how best to reach and realize the ends of the king- 
dom of Heaven, which has a message for all men. 
We need to economize effort as well as money, that 
both may be made to go as far as possible. We 



78 



BRIGHTENING THE WORLD. 



want to see them both wisely applied that they may 
return bringing sheaves. This matter is worthy of 
our best and most careful thought. 

Starting out from our well-ordered homes, we are 
met first by a vast system of organized charities, 
state, municipal, and private. They impress us by 
their vastness and their tangible bulks of brick and 
stone, and the great numbers of blind, deaf, dumb, 
simple-minded, insane, inebriate, that thus are as- 
siduously looked after at public expense, to train 
for usefulness, to recover to society, or to care for 
till they die. They have sprung into being from 
the pervasive Christian sentiment of the country and 
in harmony with the spirit of the New Testament. 
It is said that the permanent buildings of this sort 
in the United States are valued at five hundred 
million dollars, and that the annual expense of their 
maintenance is one hundred and twenty-five million 
dollars ! 

In like manner, asylums for orphans, indus- 
trial schools and children's aid societies, in great 
numbers, at public expense or through private 
generosity, attempt to make up to childhood the 
lack of parental guidance and the neglect or abuse 
of their natural guardians. A step further and a 
vast system of hospital appliances, commonly the 
fruit of private charity, meet our eyes, maintained 
for the exigencies of all manner of bodily ailments 
and accident, and chiefly for such as are poor and 
homeless, or who cannot be adequately cared for at 
home. Then comes the vast system of relief work- 
food, fuel, clothes, and rent, — and the final resort of 



HOME, TENEMENT, AND SALOON. 



helpless and hopeless poverty, the almshouse. And 
beyond this, even, are the penal institutions of the 
country which, in a degree, are also reformatory — 
and their inmates are legion. 

Just to glance at this array of institutions, main- 
tained at public expense, is the only argument need- 
ful to convince any man that matters are terribly out 
of joint, since this is the showing under the light 
and influence of the most advanced civilization of 
the nineteenth century. This, also, is evident — that 
public sentiment generously responds to the call of 
the unfortunate and the necessitous, not pausing 
seriously to inquire into their deserts, too seldom 
into the causes of the distress whose alleviation is 
sought. 

But to multiply institutions and work of this sort is 
obviously no radical cure for the evils they alleviate. 
No doubt, the hungry must be fed, the naked clothed, 
the houseless sheltered, and the work of the associ- 
ated charities, whose business it is, not only to do 
this, but to protect the community from being victim- 
ized by impostors, and from pauperism become a 
profession, must go on, whatever else is done. None 
of these things can be dispensed with, though the 
need of to-day returns to-morrow, and will be found 
the same next week or next year. 

Surely it is in order — and this, the "Forward 
Movement" in the churches of to-day emphasizes — 
to inquire, whether, at the fountain-head of society, 
it is not possible to do a more radical work — a work 
of promotion and reconstruction ! What is wanted 
is less poverty, less crime, less helpless ignorance, 



8o 



BRIGHTENING THE WORLD, 



less inebriety, lewdness, and shame, fewer people to 
care for at public expense. 

The question is not, Can we multiply asylums, 
jails, hospitals, and so on, fast enough to meet the 
demands of an increasing population^ the increase 
of crime, intemperance, divorce, breaking up fami- 
lies, and making the problem of childhood precari- 
ous ? but, can we do anything to lessen crime, in- 
temperance, the misery of ignorant, shiftless, and 
lawless homes, so as to empty these institutions of 
their inmates, or in any way lessen the demands 
made upon them ? This is the supreme question for 
organized society to ask, and along this line the 
Church may well concentrate a share of her efforts. 
To be faithless here, is to be faithless altogether, as 
to the outcome of social renovation. Not as Uto- 
pian dreamers, but as believers in the certain better- 
ment of social conditions, and in the possibility of 
lessening, if nothing more, this stream of helpless 
and criminal society, we may address ourselves to 
this work in hope. 

Society must be bettered from the bottom and at 
the sources of life, and this brings us again to the 
home ; not now to the home of the well-to-do, but 
to the cheerless, sometimes cruel homes of poverty, 
orphanage, inebriety, crime, and of lax marital rela- 
tions. In another way also, to the reputable homes 
that just keep above low-water mark, but are in dan- 
ger, in spite of themselves, of dropping below it. 
For them the problem of life is still further and se- 
riously weighted with perils not felt by the well-con- 
ditioned. The family is still that unit of humanity 



HOME, TENEMENT, AND SALOON. 8 1 



that, made right, will set the world right. And this 
is not to be done by almsgiving and temporal relief, 
nor by charity at all, however necessary this may be 
at times. 

The aim of the new movement, at once prac- 
tical and philosophical, is not, first, "to put right 
what social conditions have put wrong," but "to 
put right the social conditions themselves." It 
asks of this family or neighborhood, not what can 
be done to relieve the present distress, which may 
recur again and again, but what are the sources and 
causes of this distress, which, removed, would bright- 
en the life of this family and make it self-reliant and 
strong, henceforth ? What can be done to help this 
over-tasked mother in the care of her children, just 
now in the critical period of her and their lives, to 
enable her courage to hold out, to prevent the fam- 
ily from disintegration, and to aid her in keeping 
her children from going to the bad ? 

The Day Nursery says : leave your babes with me. 
The Kindergarten says : leave your little children 
with me ; and the mother goes cheerfully to her 
work to receive her own, refreshed and cared for oft- 
en better than she could have done it herself. The 
Visitor reports something in the surroundings that 
would improve the situation, a lack of work that 
might be supplied, a menace to older children that 
may be removed, or the need of lifting the family up 
altogether, and setting them down in a more whole- 
some place. 

Take any old quarter of a city and the likeli- 
hood is that fifty or a hundred years of constant use 



82 BRIGHTENING THE WORLD. 



has utterly corrupted the conditions of existence. 
All sanitary laws are defied ; plumbing is antiquated ; 
sewerage worthless ; water supply inadequate ; 
floors and walls of tenements full of germs of dis- 
ease ; seldom, the year through, free from some pre- 
vailing epidemic ; the first place to be stricken by 
contagion when it comes. This is no fit place for 
human habitation. To move into it is to be smitten 
with calamity. Of course, good people can feed the 
hungry, and minister to the sick, and bury the dead ; 
the ward physician and the Charities Aid Society 
can do their work, and good folk clothe up the chil- 
dren and get them into the Sunday-school while the 
owner gets his rent, but the conditions are hopeless. 
Miserable in body, forlorn in spirit, oppressed with 
an atmosphere, not life-giving but destructive, the 
outlook is hopeless. 

What is needed is a radical reconstruction of 
the conditions of life. Some of these old rook- 
eries can be purified only by fire. In some cases 
the shell can be retained and nothing else. We 
might as well understand that we cannot do a 
life-saving work in a deadly environment. What is 
attempted one hour is undone the next. It is like 
pouring water into a sieve. Change the social con- 
ditions and then hope to right what perverse social 
conditions have put wrong. The tenement house 
question is, in all its phases, a case illustrative of 
perverse social conditions, against which, under or- 
dinary circumstances, it is for the most part useless 
to contend. It is scarcely possible to conceive of a 
more forlorn hope of bettered condition than is of- 



HOME, TENEMENT, AND SALOON, 83 



fered in a crowded, stuffy tenement ; small, ill-venti- 
lated rooms, upon which the least possible expendi- 
ture is allowed, so they hold together ; uncanny 
surroundings, without privacy for family life or se- 
curity from contamination, one family by another ! 
What is to be expected from such herding of human 
beings under one roof ? If they were all reputable 
families, you could only expect degeneracy as a re- 
sult, unless under conditions exceptional. Such is 
seldom ever the case, and there is no immunity as 
against the sort of neighbor that may move in next 
door. 

Of course, all tenements are not such ; but the 
tenement-house problem is serious enough at the 
best, and the capitalist who owns a tenement should 
be so far forth a philanthropist as to see to it that 
the arrangements for family life make possible a de- 
cent amount of privacy, a due regard for the health 
of the inmates, and immunity from contamination 
by the corrupt and lawless. If philanthropy will 
not do it, the law should. Then the Church has a 
fair field for her operations and the community may 
hope to find among these people, helpers and not 
wasters. 

This much the very worst sort of tenants are enti- 
tled to, viz.: a healthy location, good sanitary ar- 
rangements, security against fire, a decent amount 
of room, a reasonable provision for the privacy of 
home life and its necessities. In such case, it would 
probably be necessary that a tenement so occupied 
have supervision, not from the ordinary sort of land- 
lord or shyster agent, but from some one interested 



84 



BRIGHTENING THE WORLD, 



in the well-being of these people, as well as mindful 
of the rents ; enforcing sanitary regulations, not so 
much by law as by example and the constraint got- 
ten over the residents by personal influence. This 
has been done, can be done again ; and, where this is 
done, the advantages are mutual as between the 
landlord and his tenants. There is less w^ear and 
tear ; the terms of lease are lengthened, and prop- 
erty is worth more, by so much as the morale of the 
neighborhood is improved. To care for one's neigh- 
bor is to care for one's self. Right the social con- 
ditions and then there is hope for those whom social 
conditions have set wrong. 

No view of depraved environment in the midst of 
which so many people exist, can ignore the saloon. 
Where population is densest, where outward condi- 
tions are worst, and races and characters most mixed, 
there the saloon thrives best — at once cause and re- 
sult of bad environment. Cause — for it is the great 
breeder of poverty and low moral and social condi- 
tion, of forlorn homes and burdened life. And the 
forlorn home and the low moral condition demand 
the saloon, and more and more. The slum is its na- 
tive element. It makes slum. There is not one de- 
cent thing about it. There is not one word to be 
said in palliation of its vicious and vitiating influ- 
ence in any community. It is bad from start to fin- 
ish. It is in possession of the field and by the con- 
sent of the people. It rules the dominant political 
parties, and municipal, state, and national govern- 
ment, just so far as it is for its interest so to do. 
And there is absolutely no hope of emancipation 



HOME, TENEMENT, AND SALOON. 85 



from this odious rule but in a political revolution 
that, in municipal affairs, at least, will force existing 
parties into the background. 

In the face of this octopus the churches do all their 
Christian work. They are expected to better and 
brighten social conditions and set the wrong right, 
while at the same time the very supporters of the 
churches are responsible for the limitations and 
hindrances that make defeat almost certain. For 
the supporters of the churches can end this anoma- 
lous state of things — the unrighteous thing thriving 
with the consent and connivance of the righteous ! — 
when they will to end it. 

Meanwhile, what is to be done ? What line of 
approach upon an ill-starred neighborhood, where 
social conditions are adverse, commends itself both 
to religion and philanthropy ? 

The Church must preach the Gospel as now; as 
much better as may be. The Salvation Army, and 
any other distinctively evangelizing agency, may 
supplement the Church, as hitherto. But this does 
not suffice. It never will suffice. Methods more 
personal must be adopted. At present they centre 
objectively in what is known as the " Institutional 
Church," the " Universities Settlement," or its equiv- 
alent, by which friendly relations are established 
with all the people of a neighborhood, the wants, 
difficulties, and perils of all become understood, 
and a gradual revolution, through personal influ- 
ence, bettering the condition of the people along 
every line of prejudice, or ignorance, or oppression, 
or weakness, and so, by and by, coming at, and 



86 BRIGHTENING THE WORLD, 



getting a hearing for, the higher aims and claims 
of spiritual Christianity. 

It plants the day nursery, and not only relieves 
worn and self-supporting mothers of care and anxi- 
ety for their babes while they earn their daily 
bread, it improves the health of their little ones; in 
consequence, lessens the home care ; and what is 
more, establishes a relation of confidence and good- 
will between the more and the less favored which 
can be utilized for the betterment of that home 
in many ways, for both temporal and spiritual 
ends 

It opens a kindergarten for little children, and 
not only keeps them off the street and out of harm's 
way, and relieves the mothers, but ministers effi- 
ciently to the development of child-nature, in a 
truly scientific method, at once winsome and help- 
ful to hand, brain, and heart — to conduct. It does 
much more than this. It sends these little ones 
home to tell what they have learned, to do what 
they have been taught, and to live by the Golden 
Rule. The home is brightened. Nor is this all. 
Almost better yet is the personal relation estab- 
lished with the family, through the children, giving 
great power over mothers, often over rude men, 
which stops not short of the mothers* meeting, and 
may hopefully expect to make the way to the House 
of God familiar to steps long unused to it. 

The thirteenth annual report of the Golden Gate 
Kindergarten Association is a remarkable document. 
It bears this weighty testimony. The first year there 
were two kindergartens, 109 children enrolled, re- 



HOME, TENEMENT, AND SALOON. 



87 



ceipts $r,8oS 70. The thirteenth year there are 35 
kindergartens, 3,108 children enrolled, receipts 
$43,731.90. Total members trained, 14,346. These 
children are not to be found on the police records, 
though they come from localities where criminals 
are made. A strict inquisition is kept, by aid of 
the police, in order to test the value of kindergarten 
training on these neglected classes. The children 
who were in the schools in the first years of the work 
are now from fifteen to twenty years of age. Only 
one of all the number — 14,346 — so far as the closest 
investigation can reveal, has ever been under arrest, 
and that boy was a mental and moral imbecile 
with an irrepressible tendency to set fire to 
things. 

The brightest and most mischievous boy ever 
under the care of the association, nicknamed Jimmy, 
the King Hoodlum of the Barbary Coast,*' is now 
nearly 20 years of age, in a lawyer's office, be- 
ginning the study of law — an exceedingly prom- 
ising young man. Another, the terror of the 
neighborhood — "Brown-eyed Joe" — is one of the most 
ingenious and gifted of the apprentices in a large 
brass foundry of the city. His talents were devel- 
oped in the kindergarten. These are sample cases 
showing what folded-away possibilities there are in 
the children of the byways and alleys. 

Still further. Mothers' meetings are carried on 
by the Golden Gate Association, and much thrift, 
domestic economy, and hygiene are thus brought 
into the homes. The mothers catch something of 
the spirit of hope and enthusiasm that their little 



88 



BRIGHTENING THE WORLD, 



ones feel in the kindergarten, and they show a long- 
ing after better and brighter things.* 

The boys' club, the girls' club, the men's club, the 
reading-room, the informal service, with the visiting 
that attends them, all have the same ends in view, 
to be reached through personal influence^ consecrated 
to doing good, in the love of God and the love of 
man, and in the faith that the Gospel and experience 
warrant. Some of this must be paid service, and 
it must be constant, tireless, tasking the whole time, 
and all the physical, mental, and moral resources 
of them who are thus engaged. Under such can 
be utilized very many voluntary helpers, that soon 
become deeply interested and consciously well- 
employed. 

Such a work can best start from some local 
church, which may thus be seen to be the centre 
whence all these helpful streams of influence flow. 
The chasm will be bridged that now actually exists 
between multitudes and the Church of God, the 
power of evil over many lives will be broken, the 
reign of the shyster over a community thus be- 
friended will end, the pov/er of the saloon for evil 
will at least be weakened, the wrongs of many a de- 
fenseless one will be righted, and the renovated 
social conditions will encourage and. put new life 
and hope into the dispirited. One section of a city 
will be brightened because measurably rightened. 
This has been done ; it can be done again. It has 
been tried on a small scale; it will be tried on a 



* Christian UnioUy Feb. 1 8, 1 893. 



HOME, TENEMENT, AND SALOON. 



89 



larger. It has to be. In self-defense it must be. 
Under a sense of Christian brotherhood it ought to 
be. Christian faith and hope say it will be. 

In all work for the betterment of the world, these 
two factors are omnipresent : the consecrated man 
and his belongings, and the Divine Spirit of truth 
and grace — the disciple and his Master. Nobody- 
else is likely to push this work along such lines but 
the disciple of Him who went about doing good 
through the power of His personal influence over 
men. Is it thought, that the disciple cannot count 
on the presence of that Master who bids him go into 
the byways, the lanes, and alleys, who commended 
the Good Samaritan, who leaves us in no doubt as 
to who is our neighbor, and who said: " Lo, I am 
w^ith you alway " ? This is no slight upon the Gos- 
pel. It is preaching the Gospel. This is not Chris- 
tianity in the air, it is Christianity applied — dogma 
vitalized and translated into life, as a district is trav- 
ersed over and over and the Gospel is taken from 
door to door. We need a great deal more of this. 
The first to rejoice in it is the man who says, in view 
of such a work, I go, sir," and goes. The first to 
feel the thrill of a new life will be the Church her- 
self, that attempts to do her obvious duty under the 
leadings of divine providence. 

It is also to be said, that the expense of such a 
w^ork in a given ward or district, is a bagatelle in com- 
parison with the cost of letting it go to the devil. 
Not righteousness, but iniquity: not the good citi- 
zen, but the criminal, is the costly thing in this 
world. Not prevention, but recovery tasks the inge- 



BRIGHTENING THE WORLD. 



nuity of men and the love of God. Not infre- 
quently it is too much for both God and man to 
compass. Brighten the heart and life of the child; 
brighten his home by bringing into it the amenities 
of life and the Golden Rule, break up the awful 
lethargy of the intellect and inspire the heart with 
fresh courage and hope, and who will venture to put 
limits to the good work accomplished ? Nobody 
supposes that the dark and dismal wards of a great 
city are to become elysian fields, and all these mixed 
and uncertain people saints. That is apart from 
the question at issue. Can the tables be turned and 
the power of the Gospel righteousness be confessed 
where now it walks as an alien and a stranger? We 
say they can ! 



IX. 



THE ETHICS OF CITY BUILDING AND 
ADMINISTRATION. 

In one of the superb idealizations of the greatest of 
prophets it is written : I will also make thy officers 
peace and thine exactors righteousness. Violence 
shall no more be heard in thy land, desolation nor 
destruction within thy borders ; but thou shalt call 
thy walls salvation and thy gates praise." Another 
of these wondrous seers anticipates the time when 

Jerusalem shall be called the city of truth and the 
mountain of the Lord of Hosts," the streets of the 
city "full of boys and girls playing in the streets 
thereof," which are also the resort of old men and 
women in utmost security, gladness and peace. 

This is a delightful state of things. Government 
is set right, peace reigns, the streets are safe for old 
and young, and praise sits and sings in the gates of 
the city. Truly this is a brightened municipality. 
Church and State have come into close agreement 

In our country there is happily, as we think, no 
union of Church and State. Yet, in the nature of 
things, they move, for a good long way, on parallel 
lines, seeking the same ethical ends and the welfare 
of the people. The work of the State, in spite of it- 
self, reaches into and affects the well-being of men for 

(91) 



BRIGHTENING THE WORLD. 



ages yet unborn. The work of the Church, though 
primarily spiritual, is immediately helpful to the 
conditions of this life, as passed in the body, and 
meant for citizenship. For her to be indifferent to 
the present, is to lose all power over the prospective 
conditions of men. Eternity has begun — is here. 
What the Church does for men needs to begin now, 
and to face the present actual conditions of society. 
Her concern is not only with the spiritualities of 
religion, which is her distinctive work, but also with 
the attitude of the State towards problems vital to 
human well-being. It is readily seen that a mutual 
co-operation between Church and State in all matters 
immediately affecting the ethical well-being of soci- 
ety would go a long way toward brightening this 
world. In Christian lands the ethics of the Church 
and the ethics of the State are, in theory, the same, 
springing out of the moral law, whose supremacy is 
recognized. 

It is the business of the Church continually to 
teach and enforce the ethics of the New Testament. 
The State is continually called upon forcibly to re- 
strain men, in practice, from setting at naught the 
golden rule of conduct, or to punish them for so 
doing. There is, then, a relation of utmost intimacy 
between the teaching function of the Church and 
the legislative and executive function of the State. 
They ought to be in agreement. Ideally, in matters 
of conduct, they are governed by the same princi- 
ples, for the powers that be are ordained of God, 
from whom the Church derives her right to be. 
They both deal primarily with human beings, then 



ETHICS OF CITY BUILDING. 



with their relations to each other, then with matters 
external to them. It is conceivable — indeed, this is 
the idea of a theocracy — that having one Author,they 
may, so far as outward conduct and the ordering of 
life in this world is concerned, come to work for the 
same ends ; yea, and to be pervaded by the same 
spirit. 

So far, then, as the same people are engaged in 
the building up of the Church, and the building 
of a city or a nation, they should be consistent with 
themselves, and not pull down with the left what 
they build with the right hand. Churchmen are al- 
so citizens. They must be seeking the same ethical 
ends, and temporal well-being — the churchman and 
the citizen; by moral means in the Church, by legal 
measures through the State. The citizen Christian 
is the man who in the Church says, I own but one 
Master and one law of life, and there is no spot of 
earth, no moment of time, no act of mine whatsoev- 
er, in which I do not owe allegiance to that Master 
and that law.*' And he who stands up and says to- 
day, in the church, believe in God, the Father 
Almighty," on the street, to-morrow, hears it author- 
itatively said — "whether ye eat, or drink," trade or 
vote, yea, " whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of 
God." 

While then the Church, as such, does not figure in 
politics or the halls of legislation, she is largely re- 
sponsible, by the public sentiment she creates and 
the citizens she trains, for the sort of politics in 
vogue, and the sort of legislation that is made and 
enforced. Failing here, these, in turn, may be a 



94 



BRIGHTENING THE WORLD. 



constant menace to her work, going far, if lax or 
immoral, to neutralize all the good she can do. The 
Church, through her citizen membership, has the 
opportunity to secure the co-operation of the State, 
in abating the evils that afflict society, and in fur- 
thering the betterment of social conditions. The 
response she will get, will depend, again, upon the 
sentiment she has created and the vigilance and 
patriotism of the citizens she has trained. 

But human nature, at its best, is always falling be- 
low its ideals. Worse than this, it is prone to divorce 
religion from morality, Christianity from citizenship, 
life on Sunday from life on week-day; and men do not 
go to the polls as they go to church, in the solemn 
exercise of a duty to be conscientiously performed. 
In consequence, the man whose allegiance is, first of 
all, to Jesus Christ, is often found m.ore strongly 
held by fealty to party, than by loyalty to Him, and 
an unquestioned and unquestionable good may be 
sacrificed, as a party measure — so many are the poli- 
ticians, so few the statesmen. Statesman and Chris- 
tian can usually work together ; politician and 
Christian, seldom. It has been said that "the 
Church is responsible for public opinion on all mor- 
al questions, and no great question of rights can be 
settled for the world until Christian men come into 
right relations with it.'* * 

Men, studying the Holy Scriptures, the charter of 
the Church, and men, students of political economy, 
have reached the same goal, and said that the need 



* " Our Country," page 258, new edition. 



ETHICS OF CITY BUILDING. 



of this world is more unadulterated Christianity 
applied to human conditions as we find them. It is 
only self-stultification, then, for the Church, if she 
accepts it as her duty to brighten the world by 
rightening it, while preaching the Gospel of the 
kingdom, not to see to it, that the State, so far from 
being in antagonism, is within her province, in force- 
ful co-operation with the Church ; that municipal 
affairs be so ordered that the wasters of society may 
not run riot in the destruction of the home and the 
corruption of morals ; and be so administered as to 
accrue to the advantage, not of the few but of the 
many. There is, then, an ethical side to the build- 
ing and governing of a city, with which the Church 
has immediately and responsibly to do. 

There are two classes of men against whom or- 
ganized society has continually to contend in self- 
protection — (i) the corrupters of society, who make 
immorality a trade and thrive upon the weaknesses 
and the depraved tastes of their fellows, and (2) 
they who take advantage of the necessities of so- 
ciety to serve the people at the greatest possible 
advantage to themselves. Both of these evils cul- 
minate where population is densest — that is, in our 
cities. This is where our system of government is 
most sorely tried, and the conflict between virtue 
and vice, probity and dishonesty, is most intense. 
The marvellous growth of our cities, the corre- 
sponding fearful increase of crime and the agencies 
of social corruption, thrusts upon the Church, with 
an emphasis never before known, the problem of 
city evangelization. 



96 BRIGHTENING THE WORLD, 



But city evangelization is entitled to the co-opera- 
tion of good government — government that answers 
to its charter divine — to be an avenger upon evil- 
doers and for praise to them that do well ; and the 
Church is responsible for using all possible means 
for securing it. If government is in league with 
evil-doers, we may, indeed, go on with our preach- 
ing and our Sunday-schools, our visitation from 
house to house, our relief and reformatory work, 
but we work against odds which makes the tremen- 
dous difference of contending with evil organized 
and shielded by law, and evil disintegrated, isolated, 
and pursued, to be throttled by law. And if we can 
have government that is a terror to evil-doers, giving 
to the saving work of the Church a so much fairer 
field, why not have it ? Is not the conflict terrible 
enough at the best ? 

It will doubtless be said that "men cannot be 
made moral by legislation.'* I am not so sure 
about that. The neglects and abuses of legislation 
are directly responsible for a vast deal of immor- 
ality — that is, they facilitate immorality. They 
make it more difficult to do right and easier to do 
wrong. They weaken the motive to righteousness, 
and they stimulate the incentives to evil. They 
break down the safeguards of character, and give 
corruption free course to make capital out of the 
weaknesses and infirmities of human nature. Of 
course, in the ultimate analysis, whether a man 
shall be moral or vicious, is settled in the domain 
of his owm personality — but how it shall be settled 
may be, often is, determined by the facilities to evil, 



ETHICS OF CITY BUILDING, 



97 



or by the obstructions in his way. The Church that 
is true and the government that is decent are at 
one in this, that it is of all things desirable that the 
citizenship of a municipality, of a nation, should be 
honest, industrious, virtuous. Then let the govern- 
ment see to it that what it allows and favors and 
what it torbids, works that way, and the Church will 
take advantage of the opportunity the more effect- 
ively to do her work. 

This is utterly free from sectarian bias. It is 
colorless of everything but good citizenship and 
good morals. As Presbyterians, as Methodists, as 
Baptists we ask no favors of government save to be 
protected in our rights. As, at once, Christians and 
citizens we demand of government that it obstruct 
the way of the evil-doer and bring him to judg- 
ment ; that it remove the causes of social and 
political corruption, and then will it be easier for 
men to do right and for the churches hopefully to 
reach men for the betterment of their physical, 
intellectual, and moral well-being. And since, with 
us, citizenship constitutes the government, of what 
sort it shall be depends upon the citizens them- 
selves. Shall it be the rule of the fittest or of the 
unfittest? The unfittest can count on all the de- 
moralized and vicious elements of society. Can the 
fittest count on all the virtuous and moral elements 
of society ? Can it count on the Church of God ? 

The other menacing element is the greed of the 
selfish. Was there ever a corporation content with 
a fair return for what it gave — a citizen corporation 
willing to serve the public of which it is a part 



98 BRIGHTENING THE WORLD. 



for a fair remuneration for its services ? one small 
section of the citizen public not willing to lay off 
upon the larger section of the same citizen public as 
much as possible of the burdens it ought to carry 
itself? May not a corporation, serving the public, 
usually be counted on to get and keep from that pub- 
lic all it possibly can, irrespective of the true value 
of that service ? Does it want simply fair play, fair 
remuneration, such as most men have to be content 
to get ? If not, its demand is immoral. It does not 
square with the Golden Rule. 

Well, if it does want the fair thing, why should 
corporation influence be the most potent factor in 
our politics? How comes it that the party bosses 
are usually corporation men, with axes to grind at 
the public expense? And these two things, — the 
man who has an axe to grind, and the corrupt ele- 
ments of society, — are found in juxtaposition, play- 
ing into each other's hands in control of the political 
situation and the complexion of the municipal gov- 
ernment. The primary meeting is a farce. It but 
ratifies the predetermined plans of the bosses. And 
then the party organs come after to w^hip us into line 
in support of the ticket which, man for man, is held 
up as of remarkable purity and strength, when it is 
neither. 

A letter, e, g., from Cleveland, O., in T/ie Christian 
Union of March 25, declares that " the men who pull 
the wires in both political organizations are corpo- 
ration men, and responsible fordoing away with the 
Crawford County plan of holding primaries. And 
also that they manipulate politics in their own inter- 



ETHICS OF CITY BUILDING. 



est, and organize the venal and disreputable vote in 
their private interest by means of the saloon and 
the dive, so that no man, not in their interest, can, 
except under the rarest circumstances, receive a 
nomination in either party." 

That this is largely, if not literally, true, will prob- 
ably not be denied. Such a situation is ominous of 
evil. Such an alliance of wealth with vice is a men- 
ace to free institutions. Within the last forty years 
the wealth of the United States increased five times, 
and crime three times as fast as our population. In 
eight years from 1884, the increase of murders was 
200 per cent. The mission of wealth is not the use 
of the criminal element to further enrich itself, but 
to become allied with the moral elements of the 
community for the suppression of vice and immor- 
ality. In contrast it is said that, *^in other coun- 
tries, by wise measures of precaution, the progress 
of crime and mendicity has not only been arrested, 
but its relative proportion in the body politic has 
been steadily reduced." 

Probably this reduction has been effected, in part, 
at our expense. For the same authority affirms that 

here alone among the great nations of the civil- 
ized world crime is on the increase." The Hon, 
Abram Hewitt, discussing the scandalous state of 
things in New Jersey and the moral resentment felt 
by the good people of the State, says: '^We cannot 
avoid the reflection that the time for conscience to 
have manifested itself was when the Representa- 
tives were chosen, and when it was the duty of 
every decent man in New Jersey to have preferred 



BRIGHTENING THE WORLD, 



character to party. Here is the very root of the evil. 
Only when the voter shall be brought to realize that 
his ballot is a sacred trust, to be used only in the 
interests of order, virtue, and reform, can we hope 
to arrest the downward progress of society and to 
raise the standard of moral action/' 

This is precisely what loyalty to Christ should se- 
cure in the citizen. When character is preferred to 
party" by every decent man, the rule of the fittest will 
have come. Tn the presence of the appalling increase 
of crime and social demoralization, Mr. Hewitt, 
speaking in New York, affirmed that our rulers ap- 
pear to be more concerned in devising new sources 
of taxation in order to provide means of support for 
the proletarian class, whose votes are needed for 
partisan ends, than in framing measures required to 
prevent the destructive elements from finally get- 
ting the upper hand." But what is true of New 
York tends to become true of all great cities, and 
concerns them all alike. And nothing can be more 
evident than that the Church must grow men who 
prefer character to party, and who will so far take 
public interests upon their hearts and hands as to 
make themselves unitedly felt in securing and main- 
taining a municipal government that will restrain 
and wholesomely terrorize the unscrupulous greed 
of gain and the wanton waste of vice. This is a 
religious duty, and until it is so apprehended the 
motive to action and to self-denial is inade- 
quate. 

And here we touch another evil of our times. It 
is the enormous growth of a pestilent individualism, 



ETHICS OF CITY BUILDING. loi 

as opposed to a true Christian socialism. Christian 
socialism says of society, as Paul says of the Church, 
it is one body, and we severally members of it, and 
so of each other. And if one member suffers, all the 
members suffer with it; and if one member rejoices, 
all the members rejoice with it. 

Who is my neighbor? And, am I my brother's 
keeper? These questions find swift answer on any 
tenable view of society. The Christian view is clear. 
And because we are so related we are enjoined, and 
rightly, to look not every man on his own things, but 
every man also on the things of others. Consider 
his welfare as well as your own. For, society, dis- 
eased in one part, means harm to the body politic — 
to you. But we know how thoroughly and dreadfully 
individualistic is the spirit of our times. And every 
man goes his own gait, and asks, How will this af- 
fect me ? Is this for my advantage ? My neighbor 
must look out for himself. The larger, the brotherly, 
the Christian view takes account of the general wel- 
fare as bound up with one's own. 

Many of the vast fortunes of this country are in 
their owners' hands only because they have sought 
their own advancement regardless of the rights of 
others. There may be practically no limit to what 
a man may acquire — e, g , once and again a million 
and a half of dollars in a day, it is said — but there is 
a limit to what he may honestly earn and rightfully 
control. And so the man with a large business, the 
professional man with a large practice, maybe named 
as types of men who want to make their business and 
their holdings larger, and so have no time for public 



BRIGHTENING THE WORLD, 



affairs. They can better afford, they think, to pay 
the cost of bad government and the increase of 
evil, than to give their personal attention to right- 
ing the wrongs of corrupt government and securing 
the benefits of a better state of society. 

This attitude may be respectable, but it is not sub- 
lime. There are any number of capable young men 
who could share this ever-enlarging business with 
honor who now find it difficult to get a footing in the 
race of life. The individualistic theory of human af- 
fairs, with all its enormous abuses, is a thing that the 
spirit of Christianity, working through the masses 
of the people, will break in pieces. It would in 
due time, indeed, break in pieces of its own weight. 
Society would become unbearable. The neglect of 
public interests will come home to roost on the 
boughs of this selfish tree and defile it. These 
fountains of corruption left to themselves will yet 
defile your own thresholds, and polluting hands 
be laid on the idols of your own home. No home 
in a city is safe against invasion where evil is ram- 
pant and unrebuked, where government winks or 
connives at wrong-doing. 

The New Testament ethics is still and forever the 
safeguard of individual and social life. Bear ye one 
another's burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ. 
Church and State, twain, but, in theory, one in this : 
that to each, virtue, order, decency, human rights 
and human welfare are dear — shall they always be 
divorced, in fact ? It has been truly said, that laxity 
in the laws or in their enforcement shows a low 77ioral 
tone in the community." In Greece it was long ago 



\ - 

\ 



E THICS OF CI TV B UILDING. 1 03 

said that "the intelligence of a community is evinced 
in the character of the men whom it elects to office/' 
It has also been said that our elected lawmakers 
represent the active goodness or morality of the 
community" — why not the active badness of the 
community? — "that the passive goodness that did 
not concern itself with public affairs could not be 
counted." Then a vast deal of goodness must be 
counted out as passive, for it does not work. And 
it is precisely this so-called passive goodness that 
needs to waken out of sleep, for judgment cometh. 
And if it first begin at the house of God, who will 
call in question the righteousness of the procedure ? 

This same indifference to the public welfare con- 
tents itself if only the conditions of successful 
business are evoked. That is about the only thing 
we hear of. A chamber of commerce or a com- 
mittee on industries is formed, and the great thing 
is to persuade people, far and near, that this or that 
is the coming metropolis, and the greatest place in 
which to do business, just now open to the public. 
This means the building up of a great city. In- 
dustries increased mean increase of population, 
greater activity in trade, more lots to be sold, more 
houses to be builded, bought, or rented. 

We also measure an administration of municipal 
affairs chiefly from the commercial side. It has 
affected the pockets of the citizens thus and thus. 
This is about all we hear. But this is not the su- 
preme thing in the building and governing of a great 
city ! More industries mean incoming people — 
under what conditions to live and bring up chil- 



BRIGHTENING THE WORLD. 



dren ? Men who are willing to see the population 
increase, and, actively, to bring it about, are they 
under no bonds of ethical consideration to see to it 
that the city be made a safe and good place in w^hich 
to bring up children ; that the temptations to evil be 
reduced to a minimum ; that they be not consigned 
to tenements and associations which only bode ill 
for body and soul ? In making out a prospectus of 
advantages, to be sown broadcast, would it not be 
honest to say how many saloons and places of evil 
resort, and how great facilities for corrupt commu- 
nications are to be found to the square mile, and to 
tell men where they are thickest ? Would it not be 
a great thing to say of any city, an advertisement 
of unmatched attraction, that every citizen coming 
here will find the saloon under the ban of public 
reprobation ; that this is a city of homes — not frowsy, 
ill-located, and ill-ventilated tenements, where men 
herd together, and life, property, and morals are 
insecure ; that in every ward of our city every voter 
may express his mind untrammeled as to what 
shall go on in it affecting the public welfare, and 
what shall be the complexion of the municipal gov- 
ernment ; that the streets are kept clean, the sani- 
tary condition of the city scrupulously looked after, 
the water supply good and ample ; that schools, 
libraries, and churches are abundant and choice ; 
that the mayor and all the heads of departments 
are by law ineligible to office if in anywise com- 
mitted to the liquor traffic, or members of corpo- 
rations whose interests may clash with the public 
welfare ? 



ETHICS OF CITY BUILDING, 



Surely this is no Utopian picture. This is not 
drawn for a community of angels, but of sensible 
folk, that believe that people^ homes, children and 
youth, and the morals of a community are of some ac- 
count, as well as the making of money. A city can- 
not be brightened simply by an increase of popula- 
tion, by swelling the list of industries, by augmenting 
commerce, and multiplying facilities for transporta- 
tion. God gives to men these great advantages of 
seaport, lake, and river that there may be builded 
cities of God, whose administration ride on white 
asses, and whose exactors are men of probity, above 
reproach. 

Believing, as we must, that this world is to be 
brightened through moral renovation, and that it 
is the solemn, bounden duty of the Church to take 
up this work that the Master lays upon her, and to 
go about it in some deliberate, well-concerted, mas- 
terful way, using every legitimate means to this end, 
the churchman^s duty as a citizen cannot be passed 
by. He may express himself in no way more em- 
phatically for social renovation than through the bal- 
lot. The powers granted to the State are immense. 
It may abate any nuisance ; confiscate, at its own 
price, any objectionable piece of property ; remove 
any lawless citizen, any turbulent child ; consign 
orphans to homes, condemn insecure tenements, re- 
quire fire escapes, invade private premises for sani- 
tary reasons, impose the strictest regulations upon 
contagion and protect the public by the most onerous 
burdens upon private individuals, and so on and on. 

The question of the right to abate by law any cor- 



I06 BRIGHTENING THE WORLD, 



rupting pest of society, clearly shown and proven to 
be detrimental to morals, and damaging to the pub- 
lic weal, is not open to debate. No method is so 
direct, so immediate of execution. Some of these 
things are done because science, humanity, and pub- 
lic sentiment demand them. A sentiment must be 
created that will demand the suppression of vice in 
open and flagrant violation of law ; as well, amend the 
laws themselves when they are wanting ; and the 
Church of God must furnish that sentiment. For 
out of Zion shall go forth the law and the word of 
the Lord from Jerusalem. 

As from under the shadow of the cross, is brought 
forward one of the most weighty duties of the dis- 
ciple, his duty as a citizen. The cross looked to a 
brightening of this world through sacrifice. Beyond 
the shadow and the cross, the suffering Son of man saw 
the world redeemed, led the way, and bade His disci- 
ples follow Him ; bade us take up our cross daily and 
follow ; bade us render unto Caesar the things that 
are Caesar*s, as well as unto God the things that are 
God's ; bade us put our talents at use that they may 
redound to His glory; bade us, disciple all nations. 
And the end of the long militant conflict is the king- 
doms of this world become His, and on His head 
many crowns. See to it that he have the crown of 
personal surrender and loyalty to Him — the crown 
of homes made Christian, the crown of the munici- 
pality laid at His feet, of the nation found among 
the nations of the w^orld made His. 

How can this ever be, unless the citizen of the king- 
dom of heaven put forth his hand to make his earthly 



ETHICS OF CITY BUILDING, 



citizenship mighty for good. From Gethsemane and 
the cross comes the summons, the mightiest ever 
heard, to mass all our forces under the Captain of our 
Salvation, to realize here on earth the fruition of the 
kingdom of God. And know that it is as much our 
duty to see that our officers are peace and our execu- 
tives righteousness as it is to preach the Gospel — as 
much our duty to seek the conditions of successful 
preaching, as to preach. When the administration 
of civil affairs is made righteous, violence will no 
more be heard in our land, desolation nor destruc- 
tion within our borders. Then we may hope for a 
fair field for our Gospel work, and the intellectual 
and spiritual illumination of men will come on 
apace. Salvation will be our muniment of defense. 
Praise will be in our gates. 



X. 



CHURCH AND NATIONAL LIFE. 

We have started out in the faith that Christianity 
is a universal religion, that the kingdoms of this 
world are to become the kingdoms of our Christ. 
This means a universal church in recognition of 
universal brotherhood. It means that " the power 
of Christ and His spirit has become a redeeminginflu- 
ence in the whole field of human life." Pre-eminently 
the two great institutions of nature and of God — 
the family and the nation — must feel this redeeming 
touch. When family life and national life are 
grounded in righteousness, and blossom in love, and 
fruit in peace, the delightful pictures with which the 
prophets strove to fascinate the gaze of the Jewish 
people and to inspire their life, will have become 
actual. Church and nation will be coterminous. 

At present, the nation is the larger term. It in- 
cludes within itself the family and the Church ; as 
well all other associations of men. To the nation we 
all must belong, and to it we are held with all that we 
have. We may go out from the family, and we may 
isolate ourselves from the Church, and from most of 
the associations of men. But from the nation we do 
not get away. Its rulers are in the Old Testament 
(io8) 



CHURCH AND NATIONAL LIFE, 



109 



and in the New, the ministers of God. The Nation 
and the Church are ideally one, and God is at once 
chief ruler and chief shepherd. The Head of the 
Church — our Christ — is Prophet, Priest, and King 
to all peoples, and to Him every knee shall bow, 
every tongue confess. 

In this Biblical conception "what is political be- 
comes most properly Christian, and the statesman 
is the minister of Christ." 

Obviously we need a higher conception of the na- 
tion and of politics. That politics should have come 
to be identified with selfishness and self-seeking, is 
at once a sign and a cause of moral corruption. It 
has been well said that " where any set of persons 
and any sphere of life is degraded in the estimation 
of men, it is almost sure to become irreligious, and 
to fulfill the evil prophecy which has gone out 
against it." Degrade an office and degrade him 
that fills it. Put politics into the category of degrad- 
ing occupations, expect that men who fill places of 
trust will seek their own ends rather than the public 
good, and the probability is that these disparaging 
notions will yield fruit after their kind. 

But rulers are the ministers of God. They hold 
the sceptre to the very intent that righteous laws 
may be righteously administered. They stand at 
God's right hand, His flaming moral law before their 
eyes, the ends of His moral kingdom to be served, 
first and last. We know and feel that " just laws, 
just policy, just relations among men, are among the 
most sacred of all things." It is the business of rul- 
ers to secure these just things, and the office and the 



no BRIGHTENING THE WORLD. 



occupant are sacred. That they are not commonly 
so esteemed, only shows how far we have got away 
from the true conception of government and of the 
sphere of politics. There are, of course, men who 
struggle against this evil environment and redeem 
official position from this reproach. It should be 
utterly redeemed. We must redeem politics in our 
own eyes, and dignify it in our speech and venerate 
it in our attitude toward it, until it is forever sacred 
in the eyes of men. For, it is of God, and every 
measure that affects the community affects the king- 
dom of God. 

The righteous administration of local affairs is 
necessarily an ally of the Church in her normal 
work — for the Head of both is Christ. The right- 
eous administration of national affairs is not only 
beneficent within national lines, it is outreaching 
to the ends of the earth. Corrupt and selfish rule 
in the Turkish Empire just now sets itself against 
the rights and liberties guaranteed to Christian 
teachers within that realm, and is a menace to the 
kingdom of God which they represent. Nothing 
but the majesty of more powerful peoples can over- 
awe and compel an unwilling ruler to do righteous- 
ly. Political selfishness and chicanery have often de- 
based the sovereign majesty of official position in our 
own country by unrighteous legislation, as against 
the slave, as against the freedman, as against the 
Indian, as against the Chinaman and the Chinese 
Empire of to-day — in every case a thrust, not only 
against the peoples immediately interested, but at 
the kingdom of God in this world. They were 



CHURCH AND NA TIONAL LIFE. 



Ill 



violations, either of sacred compacts, or of the law 
of brotherhood, or both, in unrighteousness, and 
were sins against God. 

It is difficult to eliminate wholly the selfish motive 
from the heart of any man. It may, it does, some- 
times carry men who mean to be righteous far off 
their base, as once and again it has our Presidents, 
yielding to the clamor of the demagogue in respect 
to the Chinese. Christian nations should of all men 
respect their treaty obligations ; and all the more if 
they concern less enlightened peoples. It were bet- 
ter to have cut off the right hand than to so far yield 
to the clamor of the selfish, as to drive righteousness 
from the high seat of the chief executive of the na- 
tion, by signing the exclusion acts. It was a thrust 
through China at the kingdom of God to which, no 
doubt, our Presidents mean to be loyal, and to 
which certainly and always they owe supreme alle- 
giance. 

We need not only a higher conception of the na- 
tion and of politics ; we need a broader conception 
of the Church of God. When once our eyes are 
opened to the fact, we are amazed at the narrow 
conception of the kingdom of heaven for which the 
Church stands. Without our Christ was not any- 
thing made that was made. Lifted up He would 
draw all men unto Himself. The redemption ef- 
fected through Him extends from man down through 
all orders ©f existence, till the creation itself is said 
to be groaning and travailing in pain together, in 
lon^'ing for the day of its deliverance from the ter- 
rible reign of selfishness and sin. Again, we are 



112 BRIGHTENING THE WORLD. 



taught of the Divine purpose, in the fulness of time 
to sum up all things in Christ, the things in the 
heavens and the things upon the earth, that God 
may be all in all ! What grander conception ever 
traversed the brain of man ? As a plan to work to, 
what could be more inspiring? 

But now, on the one hand, see how the grand con- 
ception of Church as coterminous with nation is 
belittled by sect. Over and over, and for long peri- 
ods together, we have seen this and that sect, ac- 
counting itself the Church — anybody outside of it, 
only by a stretch of God*s mercy, having any hope 
for the life to come — ready to call down fire from 
heaven on those that differ, making a creed article 
the test of a true Church. The New Testament 
makes the spirit of the Christ the test of all things; 
tells us plainly what religion, pure and undefiled, is, 
and explicitly, in so many words, unveils the judg- 
ment of the great day and affirms on what grounds 
men will part company to right and left. 

The secret of sect is undue stress upon dogma. 
Dogma has its place and life and conduct theirs. 
But the refinements and the subtleties of speculation, 
and the emphasis put upon dogma till it overshad- 
ows life, and cloaks unrighteousness and compels 
charity to vacate her high seat of honor, slitting the 
seamless robe of the Christ into a hundred frag- 
ments, is the spectacle that has alienated multitudes 
of the noblest spirits of this world from all sym- 
pathy with the Church. Once on this high-road of 
Pharisaism, it is easy to make contention over facing 
this way or that, in worship, lighting candles and 



CHURCH AND NA TIONAL LIFE. 1 1 3 

putting them out, vestments how many and what, 
this and that shibboleth of creed, and all the other 
tithing of mint, anise, and cummin, by which breth- 
ren are separated each from the other. 

Put the emphasis on righteousness in heart and life, 
where the true prophets have always put it, where the 
Christ puts it, and at once men begin to draw together 
— the witness that God is in the conscience. Con- 
sider what it means that this great mass of people 
that we call the " unreached " by the churches, in the 
same breath that reproaches the Church, have no 
fault to find with the Christ. What is this but an 
evidence that somehow the Christ and the Church 
that bears His name have fallen apart? At the very 
least, that the Church has so far failed to put on 
Christ that the uninitiated do not discover in her 
His likeness. 

And then, again, how often and for how long has 
the Church stood in antagonism to learning, to 
science, looked askance at art and letters, held her- 
self aloof from trade, from politics, from great 
questions of public policy. How long it took the 
Church to set herself right as towards slavery ! 
Making the fatal mistake of dividing the interests 
of men and nations into secular and sacred, and go- 
ing on the assumption that the Church exists chiefly 
for worship and instruction, is a thing of Sundays 
and best Ciothes, of preaching and prayers ! 

Instead, these are pre-eminently means to ends, in 
order to the leavening of the whole of life and all the 
interests of mankind, with the spirit of the Gospel 
and the righteousness of Christ. This is to put an 



114 BRIGHTENING THE WORLD, 

awful emphasis upon the assembling of ourselves 
together one day in the week, to meet the living and 
heart-searching God, to hear what He will say to us 
of life and duty, to refresh ourselves at the river of 
life, to seek for ourselves absolution for our sins, 
and to open our souls to the breath of the Divine 
Spirit ! For we are to carry the touch of God and 
His righteousness through the next six days, into 
trade, into our profession, into politics, into social 
life. We are to keep under our bodies and abstain 
from fleshly lusts, to deal justly, to love mercy, and 
to keep ourselves unspotted from the world. We 
are to sanctify human life. All its interests are 
sacred, for they belong to the sons of God, who 
makes His kings as sacred as His priests. And ye 
are all a kingdom of priests unto Him See, what 
an emphasis this puts upon our day with God ! 

And then think of the multitudes who look upon 
Church as a place to display themselves once a week, 
hear a little fine music, a little pulpit eloquence, if it 
can be had. They look upon Church as a thing all 
apart by itself, having little to do with honesty and 
righteousness and charity on the morrow and the 
day after, with a great purpose throbbing in its 
heart, always to do the bidding of the Master and to 
realize that for which He laid down His life ! To 
do this a man needs to gird himself in a great stress 
of the spirit, and to effect this, the services and the 
fellowship of the Church of God ought to minister. 

Still further do we need to consider that the 
Church is not only greater than any one sect— it is 
greater than all of them put together. The light 



1: 



CHURCH AND NATIONAL LIFE. 



115 



that dwells in the Church, though sometimes ob- 
scured, is the light that lighteneth every man that 
cometh into the world And all abroad, every- 
where, are men to whom that light is welcome, who 
have caught the spirit of the Master, though not 
enrolled among the sects. Does this make Church 
life and the confession of Him a matter of indiffer- 
ence ? By no means. Organized Christianity has 
its indispensable function to keep His truth and His 
redemption before the world, to preach the good 
news of God to every creature, to manifest the spirit 
of His kingdom and to extend it, to provide helpful 
forms of worship and means of spiritual edification, 
and to devise and carry out methods for realizing 
the great purposes of the Christ in the world. 

Rather it suggests: How can the Church, in loy- 
alty to the Master, so obliterate the separating walls 
of sects, or lessen the emphasis upon differences, that 
the grand unity may appear, and the other sheep, not 
of this or that fold, be embraced and recognized as 
of the one flock of the one shepherd ? And how 
can that grand co-operation in one great forward 
movement of united Christendom, of which we 
sometimes dream, be brought to pass ? 

Of past attempts to bring the general life of men 
under the influence of Christian principle, and make 
Church and nation one, we know something. This 
was always the dream of the Papacy. Calvin 
wrought at it in Geneva, Knox in Scotland, the 
Puritans in New England. These movements of 
Protestant Christianity modeled their laws upon 
Scriptural patterns, required subscription to creed in 



Il6 BRIGHTENING THE WORLD. 



order to citizenship, made Church membership a 
qualification for office even under Roger Williams' 
more liberal regime. Offences against the State 
were offences against God. 

The Church covenant of Massachusetts (July 30, 
1661,) reads: "We do solemnly and religiously, as in 
His holy presence, promise and bind ourselves to walk 
in all our ways according to the rule of the Gospel, 
and in all sincere conformity to His holy ordinances, 
and in mutual love and respect to each other, as men 
and God shall give us grace." Civil officers were 
rulers within, and by the will of, the Church. 

The limits of these schemes, as workable, were soon 
reached. As these communities grew, as coloniza- 
tion brought in diverse elements of people not so 
minded toward God and righteousness, it was found 
that the end sought, good and desirable as it was, 
could be realized only so far as it could be brought 
about "by free conviction, respecting the spiritual 
liberty of its component parts, compatible with 
large differences of form, above all acknowledging 
the sacredness of human life and social institutions, 
and making Christ not an external king but the in- 
spiriting guide of mankind." The fatal fault of the 
attempt of the Roman Church to realize this unity 
was this — that "the spiritual power sought not to 
penetrate but to rival and overtop the secular." 

In our day all the attempts of the churches — to 
which the Roman Church has been largely obliged 
to conform — aim at producing this "free convic- 
tion," which gladly recognizes Christ as the inspir- 
ing guide and Saviour of mankind. Under this sub- 



CHURCH AND NA TIONAL LIFE, 1 1 7 

lime impulse ministers and statesmen freely co-oper- 
ate in lifting the standard of practical righteousness. 
Charles Wesley in the Church, no more perhaps 
than Chatham in the nation — Burke and Fox in the 
domain of politics, as well as Wilberforce in that of 
religion and philanthropy — Beecher in the Church, 
Sumner and Lincoln in politics, the one divine 
Spirit working in them all towards a grand consum- 
mation that must bring Church and nation together. 

Canon Freemantle has well said of the English- 
men named : "They were raising the whole tone of 
politics out of the slough of corruption into which 
it had fallen, and were laying the foundations of the 
pure public life of this century." We must agree 
also when he further says that " There is no more 
animating thought in the whole range of spiritual 
aspirations than that of a nation in which one spirit 
should rule, in which all classes of men should move 
with a common and a righteous impulse." 

He refers to the great popular uprisings — the de- 
fence of Greece against the Persians, of England and 
Holland against Spain in the sixteenth century, of 
France in 1793 against United Europe, and of Ger- 
many against Napoleon in 1813, and then goes on 
to say, Yet these present but a feeble image of 
that which would be seen were a whole nation to be 
possessed with the love of God and of Christ as 
their acknowledged national bond, and each citizen 
to take for the quickening purpose of his own life 
the determination to build up, so far as his influence 
extends, the life of the great brotherhood to which 
he belongs, and of every sphere of action which it 



Il8 BRIGHTENING THE WORLD, 



contains, and of each of his fellow-citizens, in justice 
and the fear of God/' 

The only grander thing that I can conceive of 
would be a confederation of all Christian nations, 
thus minded, to banish war from the face of the 
earth, to promote the ends of justice and fair play- 
everywhere in the open arena of the world, and 
to hasten the diffusion of truth and light, the bless- 
ings of such a civilization over the world. To- 
wards such a consummation significant steps have 
been taken. One is seen when, as at this very day, 
two puissant peoples submit their differences to 
arbitration and abide the decision of the court. 
The lesson is one writ big enough for the world to 
read. And the question will be asked, If nations 
can thus adjust their differences, why not little 
knots of men here and there, capitalists and labor- 
ers, of any sort and of every sort ? 

Another step : slavery is dead here ; it is being 
whipped off the earth. Again, we are beginning, 
after so long, to treat the Indian as a man. Eng- 
land is also arraigned before the moral conscience 
of the world for her complicity in the nefarious 
opium trade, and she will be obliged to retreat. 
Spain must make amends for her assault on little 
Ponape in the Pacific Sea. The United States will 
have to retreat from her attitude towards China. 
These are moral triumphs, achieved and yet to be, 
and the world is full of them. They are the fruit 
of Christianity, a sign and evidence of the way in 
which the spirit of Christ is pervading the con- 
science of mankind. All these put together signify 



CHURCH AND NA TIONAL LIFE. \ 19 

just this— the uprising of the Christian conscience, 
the organized Church tardily waking up to it, in the 
determination to know the truth as to how the lower 
half of mankind live, and knowing it, to better it. 

Am I my brother's keeper? never had such an 
emphatic aye, as now. Never were the sweaters, 
the swindlers, the oppressors of the poor so hotly 
pursued as to-day. And the Church, no longer 
dominated by the clerical idea and the dogmatic 
theologian, with a broader conception of what 
Church means and what her mission is, is be- 
ginning to recover lost ground, and Church and 
people, Church and nation to see and realize that 
what is needed everywhere is the spirit of Christ. 
If Christ dwells in His Church, then nothing in 
human relations, all over this globe, is foreign to 
her, for God is summing up all things in Him. 

This lays a reasonable basis for all sorts of evangel- 
izing work. We can see that these free convictions 
that are flowing together, making such multitudes 
to be of one mind in righteousness all over this vast 
country, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, are the 
fruit of that steady, persistent following up of the 
settlers on the ever-shifting frontier — come they 
whence they may — with the Gospel of the grace of 
God. Commonly the colporteur and the union Sun- 
day-school, knowing no sect, have led the way. 
Church and school have followed after, hand in 
hand. Academy and college have not lagged far 
behind. Six million people, freed from slavery, in- 
stantly demand attention. Ignorance and vice herd 
together and know no race, no clime. Citizenship 



120 BRIGHTENING THE WORLD, 



in a republic, of all things, calls for enlightenment 
and religion in order to a proper exercise of its 
functions. 

The great work of Home Missions is seen to root 
in patriotism as well as religion, and these are the 
two great motive forces of the world. The man 
needs the Gospel, and the nation needs Gospel-bred 
men. The frontier needs the Gospel, or the bar- 
barian will be upon us. Man degenerates with fear- 
ful rapidity without Church or Gospel. Human 
nature responds with great alacrity to the touch of 
the truth and its living embodiment in the preacher; 
and a timid family or two in twenty or thirty, gather 
courage, declare themselves, and presently the min- 
ing or the lumber camp, to-day full of lawlessness 
and vulgarity, gambling and drunkenness, riot and 
licentiousness, takes on the orderliness of the older 
and long settled communities. 

Everybody knows that this has happened so often 
it has ceased to be novel. But it has not ceased to 
be necessary. There is no spot on this continent 
inhabited by men that can safely be left without the 
Gospel; no class of men, race or nationality, that 
can in safety to the nation be left in ignorance of 
the truth ; and without it they themselves perish. 
Christ wants them all. The nation has got them 
whether it wants them or not ; and this work upon 
the frontier, in the isolated community far from the 
routes of travel, among the mountain whites and the 
freed people of the South, is rightly laid upon the 
Church of God. 

We need to get its true perspective. We need to 



CHURCH AND NA TIONAL LIFE. 1 2 1 



divest ourselves of all petty and selfish notions. We 
need to see that here, as elsewhere, what we do for our 
neighbor we do for ourselves. This is our country. 
These are our institutions. Christ is ours. The 
Church is ours. These people all are citizens, and 
they may, they need to, become saints. Do not 
think of these Boards of the Church, as we call 
them, as interlopers, thrusting themselves in our 
way as beggars. Do not think of this army of 
teachers and missionaries out West, down South, as 
pensioners upon charity, asking to be clothed and 
fed. Who are these people ? Whose work are they 
at ? Who sent them forth ? Why did you not go 
yourself ? This is your business, and they are doing 
your work. And were it not for them and the like 
of them, the history of this nation had been far other 
than it is, and the failure would have reported it- 
self at your own hearth, and the story of your life 
had been writ in sombre colors. These are peo- 
ple whose self-denials and sacrifices have bright- 
ened the story of our national and commercial life. 

But this magnificent work cries out for more of 
Christ and less of sect. The cry is heard and that 
is much; but sect dies hard. In the older States 
the cities have drained the country till three or four 
churches often stand where only one is needed. 
But none of them are willing to retire, and they all 
hold the ground in the rivalry that is bred of weak- 
ness, in the discouragement that belongs to a wan- 
ing cause. Combined, there might be strength, 
enthusiasm, new life and power. Into the newer 
parts of our land rush the sects, half a dozen where 



122 BRIGHTENING THE WORLD, 



one only is needed, and the same story of unhal- 
lowed rivalry and strife for occupancy is repeated, 
with what frequency in the older and the newer parts 
of our broad land I hardly dare to think. 

It is in view of such a state of things that President 
Hyde, of Bowdoin College, affirms in the Forum of 
last April that *^a large part of Home Missionary 
money of the United States is spent in unwise and 
unchristian endeavor to avert the penalty of that law 
of nature and of God which dooms to death all that 
is feeble and narrow and inefficient and unneces- 
sary." And he further says that if "each denomi- 
nation would go through the country, pulling up 
its weak churches by the roots and sending their 
members to strengthen the strong churches of the 
immediate neighborhood, and then concentrate its 
efforts in making stronger the churches already 
strong, the problem of Church union would soon 
solve itself." 

This work is already begun in Maine, through 
concert of action, leaving the fittest, in any given 
locality, now of this denomination, now of that, to 
survive. So good a thing in Maine will surely tra- 
verse the continent and reach the Pacific coast in 
due time. It is another token of a brightening 
world, another assurance that life is getting the 
emphasis so long accorded to dogma, that Christ is 
slowly getting the upper hand of sect. 

Some man may be tempted to say: "Well, if that 
is so, if that is the way they waste the money, I am 
glad I never did give much ; now I won't give any- 
thing." He needs to assure himself that no man 



CHURCH AND NA TIONAL LIFE, 123 

who has been giving generously, and with a sense 
of what this country owes to the Gospel, talks that 
way. It is one of the evils incident to sectarian 
rivalry for which we are all in a way responsible. 
Now that the heads of departments are getting to- 
gether, now that the evil is seen and will be gradu- 
ally mended, it is time for such an one to repent of 
past neglects and deal generously with a cause so 
vital to this land of ours. 

This world cannot be mended and brightened in 
ignorance of facts. It is an awful story that comes 
up from the submerged tenth, but it needs to be told 
that it become impossible. The bitter cry of out- 
cast London must not be suppressed. It must be 
heard that it may cease to be heard. Sir William 
Harcourt is right — " It is better to be an optimist 
after full inquiry than a pessimist without." And 
the disciple of Christ is bound to be an optimist to 
the last. 



XI. 



THE WORLD, AND THE WHOLE OF IT. 

The initial step and the underlying fact in the 
process of brightening the world is thus expressed: 

God so loved the world that He gave His only be- 
gotten Son that whosoever believeth on Him might 
not perish but have eternal life.'* Many seem to 
read this great declaration as if it said: "God so 
loved me and my friends"; or, "God so loved my 
city and my country"; or, "God so loved white 
folks," that He gave His only begotten Son. And 
the last part is ignored altogether — that great "who- 
soever" that matches the great "world." ^'Whoso- 
ever'' fits into no gospel of exclusiveness. 

Phillips Brooks is reported as saying that "around 
each one of us lie four concentric circles— the nearest 
encloses the particular church to which a man himself 
belongs; the next distant, the whole body of his own 
religion; the one after that, those who cherish any 
religious belief whatever; the last, all mankind, even 
those with no religion at all." These circles may be 
four or ten — the question is, how many of them does 
our thought and sympathy penetrate } Do they reach 
to the outermost? Does it satisfy us that the inner 
circle is bright though the outer may be very dark ? 

No one, with his Bible open, will pretend to say 
(124) 



THE WORLD, AND THE WHOLE OF IT, 125 



that it will satisfy God if here and there a spot of 
His world is brightened, if here and there a race of 
men has the light of heaven in its eyes. ' The Bible 
is a broad book. The thought, love, and interest 
expressed in Abraham's time, were broad enough to 
take in " all the families of the earth.'* The thought 
of the prophets reaches to all people, nations, and 
languages." They all serve our King. Pentecost 
teaches the same lesson. The Revelator sees the 
kingdoms of this world the kingdoms of our Christ, 
and He Himself crowned with many crowns. And 
the Master Himself said: Go ye, disciple all na- 
tions. Preach my Gospel to every creature." 

The command is consistent with the world-wide 
love and compassion, and prophecy is matched with 
fulfilment. What is the thought, plan, will of God 
touching this world and the whole of it ? The cross 
is the answer. The early revelation led up to it, the 
later is inspired by it. It is all consonant, part with 
part. How is it to be brought about ? Faith cometh 
by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God. But 
^^how shall they hear without a preacher, and how 
shall they preach except they be sent.^" "Go 
preach ! " The commission is on us. To falter is 
disloyalty; to obey is to win and reign with Him. 
If anything is clear, this is clear. 

The marvel is that any one who reads the Bible, and 
pretends to be a disciple of the Christ, can question 
his obligation to accept the plan as thus outlined and 
work to it. Do you know of anybody that does ques- 
tion it? Do you know why so many do ? Is it because 
they are so much deeper in the secret of the Lord than 



126 BRIGHTENING THE WORLD, 



the venerable apostle to the New Hebrides, who has 
been telling American Christians what his own eyes 
have seen, and a part of which he was, or are they 
so much wiser than their brethren who give time, 
thought, prayer, and money to it ? Hardly. To 
show that this is the Biblical view of the matter, we 
need not spend another moment. We all know that 
it is. That He made of one all nations of men; that 
all have sinned; that Christ died for all; that He 
now summons the world to repentance and a new 
life through His Church preaching the everlasting 
Gospel, we know. 

Further we know — at any rate we may know- 
that all the predictions of failure of a century ago 
have come to naught. It was then said: " There are 
over sixty different languages in the world, and it is 
absolutely impossible that the Gospel can find ex- 
pression in all of them!" Voltaire prophesied that 
in 1900 the Bible would be extinct ! More Bibles 
were printed and put in circulation last year than 
were ever produced in all the centuries previous to 
1800. The languages of the world are not sixty but 
hundreds, and the Gospel message has found its way 
into three hundred of them — the whole Bible into 
all the great languages. Three of them, alone, meet 
the wants of half the world's population — the Eng- 
lish, Arabic, and Chinese translations. The Hin- 
dustani reaches one hundred millions more. Fifty- 
five languages of Africa are enriched by the won- 
derful story of God's love. 

Man's wisdom stumbles at the threshold of many 
an obscure tongue, but the Gospel is fluent in them 



THE WORLD, AND THE WHOLE OF IT 127 



all; in the lowliest as well as the proudest. Jehovah 
is the God of all living; the Bible is the world's book. 
Of course, with the pride of race that belongs to the 
strong, it was confidently affirmed that the obscure 
peoples, the lowest orders of humanity, could never 
be evangelized. But neither their dullness nor their 
brutality have been able to withstand the Gospel. 
From the Esquimaux to the Hottentot, Samoan, and 
Fijian, they have been quickened, shamed, converted, 
made anew by the Gospel. And no wonder at all, 
for it is the forthputting of God's power to save 
men. All prophecies forged against our Christ and 
His kingdom come to naught. 

Another marvel is this, that the idea of a world- 
wide kingdom, of races uplifted from barbarism, of 
a Gospel in every man's tongue wherein he was 
born, of all kindreds, peoples, and tongues keeping 
step to the Gospel march; that Christ should see of 
the travail of His soul and be satisfied, — that such 
an idea should kindle no more enthusiasm! How is 
this to be accounted for ? Most people kindle over 
something or other. Some people enthuse over mat- 
ters of very little concern. Some, over what they 
eat and drink; some over their clothes; some, over 
their horses; some, over base-ball or a boat race; 
some, over the entertainments of last week or next 
week; some, over their travels, over books, over pic- 
tures; some, over their farms, their inventions, the 
products of their skill. People do kindle over some- 
thing. Over what, depends partly upon tempera- 
ment, taste, culture, imagination, the relative esti- 
mate put upon things. 



128 BRIGHTENING THE WORLD, 



The Bible is unique in this, that it puts em- 
phasis upon people, first of all. The thing of su- 
preme value in this world is the human race. 
More wonderful than Chicago and the World's Fair 
are the people who made Chicago and the Fair, 
and will fill this wonderful expanse of creative en- 
ergy with the more marvellous fabrics of creative 
skill. It is a great thing to create of nothing a com- 
merce of millions in the Hawaiian Islands, but a 
greater thing to lift debased thousands of those 
islanders from nakedness, ignorance, and vice, into 
virtue, sobriety, and godliness. It is a great thing 
to take a tract of tanglewood and marsh land and 
convert it into a park of fruits and flowers, but it is 
a greater thing to take a city ward, gone to the devil, 
and make it clean, reputable, and self-respecting. 

A great city is always a wonder, as it grows and 
grows, multiplies its industries and expands its com- 
mercial relations, adds warehouse to warehouse, and 
converts dwellings into palaces; but a greater thing 
is in hand, to keep dominant in the city, and over 
warehouse and commerce, the true end of a Chris- 
tian civilization — that the spiritual transcends the 
material, and without righteousness in the hearts of 
the people and in civic affairs, nothing, absolutely 
nothing, can save it from the doom that fell upon 
Babylon, Nineveh, Tyre, and Sidon. A chamber of 
commerce may be .a good thing, but a church that 
is fulfilling its functions and true to its mission is 
a greater thing. And a chamber of commerce, if it 
concerns itself only with trade and commerce, and 
not with the higher interests of mankind and the 



THE WORLD, AND THE WHOLE OF IT. 129 



great civic and moral issues of the hour, has already 
mortgaged itself to Mammon. 

But many people are deficient in perspective. 
They value the near, the sensuous, what they get 
at through their senses and call their own. They 
are not moved by suffering afar off. Famine in 
Russia, cholera in Hamburg, does not affect them 
because they are so far away. Nor are they moved 
by spiritual considerations. They are with the 
rich man of the parable who pulled down his barns 
and built greater, and said to his soul, Soul, take 
thine ease; eat, drink, and be merry.*' They do not 
see how he could have been called a " fool." That is 
just what they would have done themselves. 

There is more joy in heaven over one sinner that 
repents, than there w^as over Solomon's wisdom and 
treasures, though in view of it the heart of the 
Queen of Sheba did fail her. The Queen of Sheba 
had not the kingdom of heaven point of view. That 
is still true of many. There be many who go into 
ecstasies over Turkish and Persian rugs, over Indian 
silks and shawls, over Japanese and Chinese wares 
— bronze, porcelain, embroidery — who do not care 
a fig what becomes of the Asiatics themselves. 
Their point of view is not that of the kingdom of 
heaven. It never occurs to them that the people 
who can do such things, have the capacity and the 
aptitudes for the spiritualities of the kingdom of 
heaven. 

Again, many people are defective in imagination. 
And the idea of the kingdom of heaven appeals to 
the imagination. It is the most wonderful idea 



130 BRIGHTENING THE WORLD. 



that ever traversed the brain of man. See how, 
under the pen of Isaiah, it glows, and expands, and 
towers into the unseen, and survives all the shocks 
of time, till on the plains of light, the great com- 
pany innumerable, out of every kindred, and tongue, 
and people, and nation are mustered, to begin the 
new aeon that will never end. A man must enter 
into the grandeur of this conception to be properly 
inspired by it. If he does, he will have no difficulty 
in the conclusion that this is the grandest thing in 
the world — this temple of the living God made up 
of living souls won to Him. 

To a man working on the one side of the great 
pyramid of Gizeh, it may have seemed that his work 
fitted into no grand scheme, that embraced a worker 
on the other side out of sight, or inside, equally out of 
sight. But one presiding genius was over all. The 
fellow on the one side in imagination might have 
seen the fellow on the other side working to the same 
conclusion as himself. So we, and they in far-off 
Australia, in the islands of the Pacific, in the heart of 
China and India, in the frozen lands of the North, 
and wherever else, are, under Christ, working on 
the same matchless temple of living souls, and the 
headstone will yet be brought forth with shoutings 
of grace ! grace ! unto it. 

When the friends of Xavier remonstrated with 
him for daring to go forth to savage lands helpless 
and unarmed, he replied: "If these lands had 
scented woods and mines of gold. Christians would 
find courage to go there ; nor would all the perils 
of the world prevent them. They play the coward, 



THE WORLD, AND THE WHOLE OF IT. 131 



and are alarmed because there is nothing to be 
gained there, but the souls of men; and shall love 
be less hardy and less generous than avarice ? " 
They will destroy me, you say *^ It is an honor to 
which such a sinner as I may not aspire; but this I 
dare say : that whatever form of torture or death 
awaits me, I am ready to suffer it ten thousand 
times for the salvation of a single soul." 

These ambassadors of the King of kings in non- 
Christian lands are planting the seed of Christian 
nationalities and civilizations, yet to be; and where 
now all is savagery and cannibalism shall arise the 
home, the church, and the school — in each, the 
Bible truth, the law of life — in each, the voice of 
prayer and praise — in each, the virtues of the 
Christian faith. The wilderness is glad. The des- 
ert blooms. President Merrill A. Gates says that 
those whose eyes God touches that they may truly 
see, discern the truth that, no other work compares 
in potent possibility for good with this light-bear- 
ing in dark places." 

That this is the Christian thing admits of no 
question. Let us see how reasonable a thing it is; 
nay, how necessary. Help others, help thyself, is 
a law of wide reach. The man who is bringing a 
farm to perfection is advantaged when the farms 
next to him are put under a similar culture. In- 
deed, if from farms adjacent the wind is all the 
time sowing his fields with the seed of Canada 
thistles and noxious weeds, his work is hopelessly 
hindered. It is not of very much use to quarantine 
any city of the interior against the cholera, if the 



BRIGHTENING THE WORLD, 



port of New York is left open; nor to close guard 
the seaports of the States and leave Canada un- 
guarded. Indeed, vigilance traverses the seas and 
watches the seaports of three thousand miles away 
with immediate reference to health on these shores. 
We watch the rags of Italy as well as take care of 
our own. What does it all mean ? It means that 
no man, no race or people, liveth unto himself. 
Because Africa was benighted and besotted, it cor- 
rupted the world. Her sons and daughters could 
be pressed into slavery and concubinage, and Turk, 
Englishman, and American rushed upon the spoil; 
and a costly atonement was the result. 

Africa, Christianized, civilized, is no longer the 
football of the world, but joins the forces which 
command respect and defy the world ! Every de- 
based people on the face of the earth is to the 
world like a cancerous sore on the body of a man. 
A sailor from Ohio finds his virtue riddled in the 
corrupt seaports of the Orient, or the Pacific seas. 
The same is true of many travellers. Christianize 
the world, and the world has everywhere one 
standard of ethics and is dominated by one law of 
life. 

It is coming to be with all peoples as with two 
contiguous wards of a city. One cannot be all 
clean, the other all rotten. The clean must slough 
off the rot, or the rot will invade the clean. We 
of this land did not dare divide this country East 
and West, into North and South. Slavery was, 
from the day of Mason and Dixon's line, menaced 
and doomed, because north of it the man and the 



THE WORLD, AND THE WHOLE OF IT. 133 



soil were free. This land had to be all free or all 
slave. So with the world, and the whole of it — 
all Christian or all pagan. We are all neighbors. 
The sea is no more a separating barrier. Africa is 
nearer to New York than was Boston to Ohio fifty 
years ago. Our rum, our firearms, our vices, are 
hers to ruin, as her weakness and helplessness were 
our temptation to awful sin. Shall the mightier 
Gospel of the Christ be hers also, as it is ours ? 
The method of the Christ is seen to be divinely 
reasonable, and, more and more, a necessity of self- 
preservation. 

Some who say, '^YeSy' to His ^' Go, preach," em- 
phasize the "beginning at Jerusalem" as mean- 
ing — Finish, as you go. But this is short-sighted. 
We cannot make this kettle boil if a stream of cold 
water is somewhere being let in all the time, no 
matter how hot the fire. We are saying, we cannot 
perfect this country unless you stop immigration 
and give us a chance at the people, all by themselves. 
And it is easy to see that if, from the Reformation 
on, the present sense of the value of an open Bible 
and evangelistic methods had pervaded Europe, a 
very different sort of emigrant would be coming here. 

When sixty Chinamen from Canton, thereabouts, 
went to the Sandwich Islands, some years ago, hav- 
ing been evangelized by missionaries, and took their 
church with them, they set before the world an ob- 
ject-lesson of what might have been if the Church 
had obeyed the Master and stuck to her evangelizing 
from the beginning until now. Equalize the tem- 
perature of the v/ater within and without the kettle, 



BRIGHTENING THE WORLD. 



and we will make it boil. And is that not just what 
we are coming to ? The nations flow together, as 
now within an area of one hundred acres in Chicago 
will a world in miniature be seen. Our missionary 
activity is preparing the way of the nations to mix 
and mingle on the common footing of Christianity ; 
or shall it be paganism ! 

We can finish nothing apart from the whole. We 
can perfect no race while surrounding races are left 
to untutored savagery. The body is perfected when 
every member is developed into symmetry. There 
is no useless member. There is no race of mankind 
that cannot be utilized, in the confederacy of na- 
tions, in the kingdom of God. Finish as you go " 
has no place for the soles of its feet. The process 
of leveling up, made universal, has its warrant in 
good Gospel and in common sense. 

The Providence of God is saying to the most 
favored nations. You can go little further till your 
brethren catch up. Just as social science calls a 
halt upon the two hundred and fifty thousand who 
hold three-fourths of the property even of this land 
of the free, and are reaching after the rest. They 
must look after the hindmost or the hindmost will 
look after them. The thing is monstrous. The in- 
equality is rank. It cries to heaven. Just so, it was 
never meant, it never can be, that God's greatest 
boon to men, the Gospel of His Son, and all the 
blessings it brings in its train, should be the mo- 
nopoly of the few, even for a day. 

Why not say to a child, you have many faculties, 
but we must develop one at a time. Finish as we 



THE WORLD, AND THE WHOLE OF IT 135 



go, you know ! A good many studies, but one to 
finish, and then another, my child ! A great many 
trades are wanted in civilized society, but we must 
carry one to perfection, at a time, you know ! 

Shall it be music first or sculpture ? Bread-mak- 
ing or dress-making? We commit no such folly. 
All these things are needed. Begin all along the 
line, each following the bent of his aptitudes or the 
opportunity that is his. Here is a world to be evan- 
gelized. There is one Lord and one Spirit. Disci- 
ples, a multitude, owning one Master, led of the one 
Spirit, one to do this, another that ; all in sympathy 
with each, each with all ; one to go to Kansas, an- 
other to Kamschatka ; to reach men, to save the " all 
peoples, nations, and languages,'* who will yet serve 
our Christ ! Can we trust the superintending Spirit ? 
Do we believe the Christ will keep His word and be 
with His servants alway, even unto the end of the 
age ? That all over this world the perfecting work 
can go on simultaneously, as all the several parts of 
a watch are being made, each apart, but each relative 
to the whole ? 

It would seem that we might, and that the little 
selfish scheme of finishing off our family, or our 
town, to the last pitch of refinement, would find no 
favor with Him, who possibly, as with us, finds His 
sympathy drawn out even more for the prodigal 
than for the elder son ; for the little blind child of 
the family, even more than for the lusty children 
who have all their senses developed and God's 
world all open to them ! Did this never occur to you, 
the good economy of the speedy evangelization of 



136 BRIGHTENING THE WORLD, 



the world ? God is the great economist. Men 
dreadfully mix things that He has made clear, and 
they all have to come to His Book before they reach 
a conclusion. 

The waste of heathenism and of even semi-pagan 
peoples, is something appalling, — the waste of man- 
hood, of talents of the highest order, for lack of the 
Gospel ! Now, in the arts, in manufactures, great 
attention is paid to waste. Wealth is found in what 
a few years ago went to the refuse heap. Cast-off 
clothing, the slag of furnaces, old ore heaps, a little 
while ago only in the way, now worked into shining 
gold. Good thing ? Yes, to be sure. 

How much better is a man than a sheep, than the 
refuse of furnace or mine ? But races exist this day, 
less cared for than this material waste. Continents 
populous with human beings, but half developed, 
because men are half developed. Look at the Asiatic 
Continent. Have you thought much about it ? 
*^ Well, why should I ? What is Asia to me ? Give 
me a rug or two now and then. Keep up my rations 
of tea and coffee. Give me that India shawl, if you 
please, and that exquisite piece of bronze, but don't 
let those dreadful Asiatics come near me." Why ? 
What is the matter with the Asiatics ? 

The Asiatic Continent ! The largest, richest, most 
populous continent on the face of the earth ! In 
civilization, the oldest ! Mother of great religions, 
of all the religions worth naming ! The great fore- 
runners of the Christ and the Christ Himself, w^ere 
Asiatics. Judaism, Buddhism, Brahmanism, Confu- 
cianism, Christianity, Mohammedanism — all Asiatic. 



THE WORLD, AND THE WHOLE OF IT. 137 



The Prophets of the Old Testament, the writers of 
the New, and the Book, the greatest of books — are 
all Asiatic. The early fathers of the Church whose 
subtle thought and kindly interpretation of Christi- 
anity is so influencing modern movements within 
the Church, were many of them, Asiatic. 

Asiatic History — what a story of colossal empires, 
magnificent cities, world-conquering armies led by 
great generals ; astonishing commerce from India 
to Tyre, and thence to all the Mediterranean lands. 
All these great peoples have seen their brilliant 
eras, their thinkers, artists, poets, builders, warriors. 
They have not lost, past recovery, their vigor, their 
old-time possibilities ; but what, among the great 
powers of the world do they stand for to-day, the 
peoples that once threatened Europe, invaded Af- 
rica, reduced Egypt to vassalage and destroyed her 
Memphis and her Thebes? Why does Asia stand 
for so little ? She lost her Gospel and her Christ, 
rather than welcome both to dominate her life. 
The Light of Asia grew dim and the sun of right- 
eousness is not yet welcomed. 

The Asiatic Continent evangelized, made Chris- 
tian, is the wheeling into line with the world's prog- 
ress the most versatile of powers, the most vigorous 
of evangelizing agencies. The true Christian type of 
thought, life, worship, is surely not Occidental, nor 
Oriental only, but both. Neither is complete without 
the other. 

Keshub Chunder Sen, whom all respect as hav- 
ing drunk deep at the fountains of our Christi- 
anity, thus forcefully resents the common preju- 



138 BRIGHTENING THE WORLD, 



dice against Asiastics : " If, however, our Christian 
friends persist in traducing our nationality and na- 
tional character, and in distrusting and hating Ori- 
entalism, let me assure them that I do not in the least 
feel dishonor by such imputations. On the contrary, 
I rejoice, yea, I am proud that I am an Asiatic. And 
was not Jesus Christ an Asiatic ? Yes, and His dis- 
ciples were Asiatics, and all the agencies primarily 
employed for the propagation of the Gospel were 
Asiatic. In fact Christianity was founded and de- 
veloped by Asiatics, and in Asia. When I reflect on 
this my love for Jesus becomes a hundred-fold in- 
tensified ; I feel Him nearer my heart and deeper in 
my national sympathies. Why should I then feel 
ashamed to acknowledge that nationality which He 
acknowledged ? Shall I not rather say. He is more 
congenial and akin to my Oriental nature, more 
agreeable to my Oriental habits of thought and feel- 
ing ? And is it not true that an Asiatic can read 
the imageries and allegories of the Gospel, and its 
description of natural sceneries, of customs and man- 
ners, with greater interest, and a fuller perception 
of their force and beauty, than Europeans ? In 
Christ we see not only an exaltedness of humanity, 
but also the grandeur of which Asiatic nature is sus- 
ceptible. To us Asiatics, therefore, Christ is doubly 
interesting, and His religion is entitled to our pecul- 
iar regard as an altogether Oriental affair. The 
more this great fact is pondered, the less I hope 
will be the antipathy and hatred of European Chris- 
tians against Oriental nationalities, and the greater 
the interest of the Asiatics in the teachings of Christ. 



THE WORLD, AND THE WHOLE OF IT. 139 



And thus, in Christ, Europe and Asia, the East and 
the West, may learn to find harmony and unity/' * 

The waste of Africa through barbarism is unspeak- 
able. Africa redeemed means untold wealth, un- 
measured strength, to the kingdom of our Redeemer ; 
a vast accession to the working forces of the world. 
Prostrate in the dust, she is neither a thing of 
strength nor beauty ; neither self-contained nor an 
ally ; rather armies of men, a continent of magnifi- 
cent proportions, running to waste ! When the 
spirit of little Belgium's liberal monarch penetrates 
Europe and America, how soon will the intelligence, 
the piety, the wealth of the world bring this conti- 
nent, redeemed from waste, into line with the powers 
that now dictate the policy of the world ; and that 
policy, no longer tempted to shape itself to prey 
upon the weak and helpless, take on a nobler type, 
in recognition of a brotherhood, lost but found. 

Four centuries have passed over the world since 
Columbus ventured forth upon the high seas. It 
was the beginning of an era of mastery over the 
great oceans that lave all shores, and of the use of 
all rivers to reach the heart of all continents. It 
was the beginning of the end of all ignorance as to 
race, religion, language, metes and bounds of all 
peoples that dwell on all the face of the earth. For 
one century of the four has the Church of the Christ 
been learning the extent of her mission, the breadth 
of that — Go, preach. She has touched no race that 
has not responded, some slowly, some quickly, to her 



Freemantle's Bampton Lectures, Appendix. 



BRIGHTENING THE WORLD, 



message of life. She has found no language she 
could not reduce to writing, no tongue into which 
she cannot put the words of life, no people whom 
she cannot elevate, reaching the life through the 
heart, civilization through christianization — this is 
the order and the method, with all barbaric peoples. 

Already, her trophies are as amazing as the 
World's Exhibit of its industries. To all unbeliev- 
ing doubts or arguments her answer is ready. We 
have seen with our eyes, heard with our ears, and 
personally cognized the results of a preached Gos- 
pel, borne abroad in faith and love to all peoples. 
Now, let the grandest era of the world begin. Let 
the toils and triumphs, the explorations and discov- 
eries, the translations and beginnings of Bibles, 
churches, schools, communities made christian, be 
utilized. The swift ship shall sail for the Church. 
Diplomacy shall work for her. The flags of Chris- 
tian nations shall wave over her. The wealth of the 
world shall serve her sublime purposes. Learning 
shall be her handmaid. And best of all, and always, 
He who loved the world and gave Himself for it, 
alive from the dead, shall inspire the testimony and 
make mighty the word preached. For world with- 
out end and to all peoples, is this Gospel of Jesus, 
the Christ, the power of God unto salvation to every 
one that believeth. 



XII. 



EACH ACCORDING TO HIS SEVERAL 
ABILITY. 

In his great work, entitled " The City of God," Au- 
gustine elaborates the theory that the City of God 
is a separate state which has been growing up, first 
in the kingdom of Israel, then in the Christian 
Church ; that it has nothing to do with the general 
life of mankind ; nothing for the renewal of society 
by its influence, as, indeed, having no vocation for 
the redemption of society as such; rather a gathering 
out of the world of mankind a certain number, com- 
mitting the world itself to the flames to fit it for the 
eternal habitation of the saints. It makes Christians, 
not the light and salt of the world, as the Master 
said, but a race of timid separatists," having as lit- 
tle as possible to do with the world. This senti- 
ment for a long time prevailed, and was controlling 
in the Church — nor are we yet wholly rid of it. 

But no one can face the present attitude of Church 
life, read the papers and the magazines, listen to 
the discussions of Church congresses and conven- 
tions, without becoming conscious that a new spirit 
is abroad ; a renaissance has come ; a new era is 

(141) 



BRIGHTENING THE WORLD. 



dawning on the world. It moves on precisely the 
opposite principle from that of Augustine, and ex- 
clusive election into the kingdom of heaven. Its 
attitude toward the world is not that of the Phari- 
see who gathered up his robes and stood aloof from 
his fellows, or of the Levite that passed by on the 
other side, but of the Samaritan. And now that we 
are getting there, we find it is only the old Gospel 
that Christ preached, and put at the entrance of His 
kingdom, and wonder what we have been thinking 
about, reading out the most significant parts of what 
Christ read in ! 

The kingdom of heaven is like leaven. It is 
aggressive against evil in the man and in society. 
Its end — a renewed man, a reorganized society, con- 
trolled by the law of love. But now, the kingdom 
of heaven is in you^ not in the air, to bless you, that 
you may be a blessing. I bless thee, Abram, that 
in thee may all the families of the earth be blessed. 
The Christian religion has, first of all, to do with 
individuals. It concerns itself with our personal 
relation to God. The Church, as made up of indi- 
viduals, moves upon the world ; is organized for 
Christian nurture, on the one hand, and for aggres- 
sive measures, on the other. And the law of life is 
this — To each one and from each one, according to 
his several ability. 

So then, let us stand apart and hear the Master 
say what He expects of us, each one. He summons 
us each to be right and to do right. Take the beam 
out of thine own eye. Make the tree good and his 
fruit good. Of a bramble-bush men do not gather 



WHAT THE MASTER EXPECTS OF US. 143 



grapes. It is the prayer and its answer, as personal 
as we can make it — Create in me a clean heart, O 
God, and renew a right spirit within For this 

God gives the grace, as He does the opportunity. 
And the summons is to every man. 

The next step (2) is discipleship — learn and follow. 
It asks, what wilt thou have me to do ? The first 
thing we have to learn is that Christ comes to sanc- 
tify the whole orb of life ; that He lays His hand 
upon all that we have and are ; that His first thought 
is for what we are, and next, for how we live, which 
expresses what we are ; and next, what we purpose 
to do with the talents and opportunities He gives us. 
Christ comes to realize in us a new order of man- 
hood, and in the world a new kind of life. The 
manhood and the life. He was. It is simplified for 
us thus — Be as I am. Do as I do. The spirit of 
Christ is the test of all things — of character, life, 
deeds. Out of this a brotherhood, thus minded, 
working together to bring society under this life of 
the Spirit, and to make the world see that this is the 
best thing possible for all men, and adjust itself ac- 
cordingly, along all conceivable lines. 

All this is to be entered upon, within and without, 
in the confidence of hope, in the brightness of the 
assurance that the power that works mightily in us 
to make and keep, and use us, is nothing less than 
the power that raised up our Lord Jesus from the 
dead and gave Him glory. Can these dry bones 
live? They can; ihey do. Can a man be born 
anew ? Can the unclean become clean ? Can the 
selfish become generous ? Can a man love what he 



BRIGHTENING THE WORLD, 



once hated ? Can he become a new creature ? Can 
tyrants become unselfish ? Can Governments be 
beneficent ? Can business be christianized ? Can 
the slums of cities be made decent? Can slavery 
be done away? Can the savage and the cannibal 
become saintly ? Why do you ask ? You know this 
has been done a thousand times. There is nothing 
to do to bring in the millennium, the like of which 
has not been done, again and again. All we need is 
enough of it, wrought along the lines always found 
effective. Let a man be filled with the Spirit, live 
in the Spirit, walk in the Spirit, go in the Spirit to 
his daily task; let a multitude so go; let every man 
that names the name of Christ so go, and the reaper 
will overtake the sower. 

But now for the principle — " each according to his 
several ability." It was an early resolve of Living- 
stone's : " I will place no value on anything I have 
or may possess, except in relation to the kingdom 
of Christ. If anything I have will advance the 
interests of that kingdom, it shall be given or kept, 
as by keeping or giving it I shall most promote the 
glory of Him to whom I owe all my hopes, both for 
time and eternity.'* But this is only what is com- 
mended unto all — Present yourselves a living sac- 
rifice." *^ Whether ye eat or drink, or whatsoever ye 
do, do all to the glory of God." This old scripture 
found its embodim.ent in Livingstone, and if Prot- 
estants were to canonize anybody, I suppose they 
would canonize him. 

The Anarchist creed runs thus : " The Anarchist 
is a self-offered man. Everything in him is con- 



WHA T THE MASTER EXPECTS OF US, 145 



sumed by one single interest, one single thought, 
one single passion. He lives in this world for the 
purpose the more surely to destroy the existing 
order of society. He knows only one science, the 
science of destruction, and he himself must be ready 
to die at any time, and ready to kill with his own 
hands any one who seeks to thwart his aim." 

Have there been such men ? There have been, 
there are such men. Men live their life and go to their 
callings thus consumed. Then a man may have one 
passion in life controlling. If he may be self-offered 
in evil, he may be in good. Paul was such an one. 
The Church has many such. Ought not disciple- 
ship to mean just this? "I will place no value on 
anything I have or may possess, except in relation 
to the kingdom of Christ." We are here, each one 
— Do we believe it ? Do we accept it ? — to brighten 
this world to the extent of our several ability by 
setting the wrong right ; making the crooked 
straight and the rough places plain. 

This is only to "seek first the kingdom of God "; 
and we are all bidden to pray, really pray, " Thy 
kingdom come"; and, so to do, is robust, healthy, 
beneficent moral life. Drummond's advice is good : 
" Don't touch it if you do not mean to put it first. I 
promise you a miserable existence if you seek it 
second." In this spirit, then, we each, as disciples 
of the Christ, ought to live, and the functions of life 
are manifold; the possibilities of good as varied as 
our physiognomy. 

As TO THE FUNCTIONS OF LIFE. I. We mOSt of US 

live in homes^ and our obvious first duty is to make 



146 BRIGHTENING THE WORLD, 



these homes Christian, and so, clean, pure, strong, 
for the fashioning of character on a noble pattern; 
not necessarily elegant, or even beautiful, but true 
and refined. They may be all this and cut no out- 
ward figure in the world. 

2. We are all citizens , and, in our measure^ every 
one responsible for a healthy public opinion ; for a 
clean, pure administration of municipal and national 
affairs ; for the maintenance of law and order, and 
an insistence upon righteousness to be controlling 
in all civic relations. 

Doubtless, it is of first importance that a man so 
carry himself and conduct his own affairs that this 
may be true of him and that for which he is imme- 
diately responsible. But this is by no means the 
limit of duty in an evil world. He must combine 
with the like-minded to create a sentiment that will 
be potent for good and a swift witness against evil. 
He must be the incarnation of a righteous public 
spirit, as was Christ when He pronounced His 
dreadful woes upon hypocrites, oppressors, and 
liars, and when He scourged out of the temple the 
sacrilegious tradesmen that defiled the House of 
God. 

Charles Kingsley said : " I will never believe that 
a man has a real love for the good and beautiful, 
except he attacks the evil and the disgusting the 
moment he sees it.'* That test would rule out a 
great many who profess to love the good. There 
are so many good people who never want to antag- 
onize anything ; so many timid conservatives who 
are afraid to have anything done except in the way 



WHAT THE MASTER EXPECTS OF US, 147 



of their fathers, though that way may be as useless 
in our time as a wooden gun in modern warfare ; so 
many soft and dainty people, who prefer to sit by 
their fireside rather than put themselves out of the 
way for the public good ; so many whose mouths 
are shut by their indirect complicity with evil, that 
the cause, which, if each stood in his place accord- 
ing to his several ability, need never trail its 
banners, is often whipped off the field. Who is 
responsible but the men who come not up to the 
help of the Lord against the mighty. 

Mr. Cable recently said that ^'a man without 
a quick, strong, aggressive, insistent indignation 
against undoubted evil, is a very poor stick." There 
are too many ^' poor sticks" in the christian Church 
that have none of the self-devotement to the Christ 
that the Anarchist has to his bad cause ! This would 
quickly make of the Church a militant army. 

3. We also /ive in social relations with our fellows; and 
out of it come business, associations of men, clubs, 
guilds, employers, employees, the institutions of 
beneficence and education, the vast, complicated 
machinery of society. Into this we enter, some with 
one talent, with two, five, ten. And here is the law 
for each — to do good and to communicate forget 
not." Keep a good conscience. Live honestly in all 
things. Be free from the love of money. Let mar- 
riage be had in honor among all and the bed unde- 
filed. Remember them that are in bonds as bound 
with them, the evil-entreated as yourselves also in the 
body. Bear ye one another's burdens. 

So runs the great charter of social life, that, 



148 BRIGHTENING THE WORLD, 



actually realized in the world, brings back the lost 
Eden; that, lived up to by them who have solemnly 
sworn to make this their law and pattern, would 
instantly put a new face on the world. For it says 
to you, an employer, put yourself in 3''our em- 
ployee's place, and ask what is fit and proper to be 
done. House-mistress, put yourself in the house- 
maid's place and do likewise. In view of a man 
being crowded to the wall, suppose that was your 
fix ? Take no mean advantage. Labor for the 
man who is down, the man who is going to pieces." 
A man saved, is worth to society a dozen wrecked 
ones. And it says to you, an employee: be honest, 
be faithful, be law-abiding, agitate for your rights 
and claim your dues, with a clean record behind 
you, and a just demand in your lips, and win. 

In such a country as this, Mr. Lowell said, " public 
sympathy is on the side of justice in every labor 
contest, so long as that side remains untainted by 
crime. The way to reform is the path of honor, 
patriotism, and common sense." The man who 
walks in the spirit, appears, as stick, in all the walks 
of life; faces, as such, the relations in which he 
moves with his fellows, to apply the law of a benefi- 
cent righteousness to all human concerns, knowing 
that the commandment is exceeding broad, and, to 
our modern eyes, the field of its application is no 
less broad. For it is true, as Arnold, of Rugby, said. 

Every outw^ard thing, having a tendency to affect 
moral character, either for the better or for the 
worse, and this especially holding good with respect 
to riches or poverty, economical questions, in all 



WHAT THE MASTER EXPECTS OF US. 149 



their wide extent, fall directly under the cognizance 
of those whose object is to promote man's moral 
welfare." 

4. We also belong to a race of many races and 
climes. All children of the one Father of us all, 
w^hom the Light of the World enlighteneth ; for all 
of whom the Christ of God was lifted up ; to all of 
whom is the Gospel message addressed ; all of whom 
are capable of knowing God and of being changed 
into His image. From that race we may not isolate 
ourselves; to its woes and wrongs we may not be 
indifferent. The strong may not say to the weak, we 
have no need of you ; much less, put their foot 
upon the neck of the weak. The law is. Go ye, dis- 
ciple all nations. 

These, all, are functions that we touch not only 
every day, we exercise them simultaneously, and 
stand in them continually. We live, as belonging 
to the home, the community, the nation, the race, 
to society and the business relations of the world; 
and the omnipresent law, applicable to us all and 
always, is — the law of love, and each according to 
his several ability. 

His several ability, again, intimates a diversity 
of gifts and varied possibilities for each. And this 
we know to be true. We are taught that our intel- 
lectual and moral gifts, our time, influence, char- 
acter, our capital and its uses, are ours — Do we be- 
lieve it ? Do we accept it ? — "as a means of advanc- 
ing the intellectual and moral good of society.'* 
This is a purpose so magnificent and far-reaching 
that it contemplates an end of war, an end of selfish 



BRIGHTENING THE WORLD, 



competition as the law of trade, an end of tyranny 
as a mode of government, an end of degrading 
superstition, and the universal diffusion of light and 
law, love and learning, the knowledge of God's way 
of saving men, and a transformed world ! To each 
of us comes the summons to make this the end of 
life — and the measure of duty, each according to 
his several ability. 

1. Every man has the gift to pray — a gift that may 
grow with use. Let no man put slight upon that, 
upon which the Master hinged so much. Specially 
His — Pray, Thy kingdom come ! and His — "Pray 
ye the Lord of the harvest that He would send forth 
laborers into His harvest." Each according to his 
several ability, let him pray. 

2. Every man has the potent gift of influence, con- 
scious or unconscious, always of some real value, to 
be thrown on the right side, by the life lived, the 
word said, the vote cast, the deed done. Each ac- 
cording to his several ability. 

3. Every man has some time to use for personal 
work in bettering this world. Time never goes 
alone on errands of this sort. Time is a something 
into which we put our personality for a little or a 
longer while, to influence some one, to teach some 
one, to minister to somebody, to see a good measure 
through, to fight an evil, to promote those schemes 
of beneficence whose success is the brightening of 
the world. Some of us can give more, some less, of 
our time. All of us can give somewhat, and each 
according to his several ability. 

4. Even so, the element of personality varies end- 



WHAT THE MASTER EXPECTS OF US, 151 



lessly through all degrees of native capacity, of cul- 
ture and education, gifts and attainments, tact and 
aptitude, experience and solidity. Into this fraction 
of time, daily, weekly, bring yourself, thus equipped. 
You can bring nothing so precious. And come in- 
formed by the Word, and imbued by the Spirit of 
Christ, which He promised, and who makes of these 
bodies temples. 

We know what a power very humble people thus 
possess to influence others. Take the history of a 
church that stretches away fifty or seventy-five 
years, and think of the varied talent put into its 
work. Some could give much, some little, time. 
Some were trained in all the schools could give, and 
some got their learning on the run. Some were 
precious stones uncut, and some had been on the 
lathe of the lapidary. Some had nothing but them- 
selves, and some brought wealth besides. Some 
could teach, some could sing, all could pray. Some 
could soothe an anguished spirit, some could nurse 
the sick to health. All this would be ideal if it 
really included everybody who says : I am on the 
Lord*s side"; if each, according to his several abil- 
ity, put himself into the work of the kingdom, in the 
way he best can, and in as many w^ays as lie within 
his power. 

His several ability" may cover possibilities in 
many directions. He may touch a chord that vi- 
brates within the life of the church itself; another 
that vibrates in some great city charity; and an- 
other and another playing upon the varied life 
and needs of a municipality; another that pulses in 



152 BRIGHTENING THE WORLD, 

the work of education; another that reports itself 
in the Home Mission work of the West or South, 
and again in China or Japan, in famine-smitten 
Russia, or Darkest Africa. He may be doing this 
every day and for so long as he lives. For this is a 
something never finished till the Master comes and 
says, Give account of thy stewardship. This is the 
great business of life, and no one who has learned 
of the Master is found asking, how little will suffice 
for me? but, how much is possible? — not, if a fraction 
of himself will answer, but what can my whole per- 
sonality avail for the betterment of the world ? 

In how many ways is this pattern shrunken. For 
one — a vast many use their culture, their leisure, 
their books and reading, their music, their wealth, 
simply as a luxury, personal to themselves and a lit- 
tle circle of congenial friends. The great outlying 
world of need and sin ; how the greater half of the 
world live ; what burning questions agitate the 
times, and seek and will have solution, they make 
no room for in their thought, welcome not into their 
sympathies, nor touch with one of their fingers. 

They are like some churches which are character- 
ized as " pagan forms of social crystallization, with 
a thin gilded veneer of Christianity. They have 
Christ^s religion with the bottom fallen out. They 
spend oceans of money in satisfying their own pious 
sensibilities with fine preaching, exquisite music, and 
solemn architecture, and yet wonder that they make 
no converts. They do not touch social sins, and do 
little or nothing to change for the better the city in 
which they live. They are splendid illustrations of 



WHAT THE MASTER EXPECTS OF US, 153 



refined, pious selfishness. The world sees through 
it all and turns infidel.'* ^ 

The world can never be bettered after this fashion. 
Individually, and as churches, we must get nearer 
the Christ, who did not attempt to reach us with a 
trumpet from heaven, but made Himself one with 
us, took upon Himself humanity as a garment and 
touched lovingly, and so savingly, the lowest strata 
of human life. We say it is sublime in Him ! Why 
not in us t 

The pattern is shrunken in another way. Not to 
do something we are ashamed ; so something is se- 
lected and done. So far, well. As a stopping-place 
it may be very ill. It is always an immense loss to 
an individual to confine his sympathies to a limited 
area or line of activity, even to his own personal 
work. But this is all the time being done. There are 
a great many intelligent people who can be drawn 
on in a degree, for the relief of want or a hospital 
service, who are wholly impervious, or pitifully indif- 
ferent, to the great evangelizing work of the Church 
in city and country, at home and abroad, or to the 
work of the higher education in the newer States or 
the great centres of civilization. 

Yet, incomparably, the greatest work to be done, 
the most necessitous, the most radical, the most 
helpful, is evangelizing work — preaching the Gospel 
of Christ and getting people to live it ; building 
churches and sending to and fro, everywhere abroad 
the true heralds and exemplars of the faith of Jesus. 



* Judson, in Missionary Review, March, 1893. 



154 



BRIGHTENING THE WORLD, 



I say it is the shortest road to permanently reach 
every sort of need known to humanity. The quick- 
est way to permanently abolish laziness, ignorance, 
crime, helplessness, poverty, the greed and wrong of 
all sorts of power, is to fill this world with churches 
of Jesus Christ. For such churches, if true to their 
Founder, are necessarily educational and philan- 
thropic, as well as evangelistic. It makes of narrow 
folk, broad, intelligent, many times over more help- 
ful, people, to take in the wide field which is the 
world, and to have a share in the many noble move- 
ments of the age in which we live. 

Then, again, having done some one thing, many 
seem to use that as a patent contrivance to shut out 
all new-comers. We are all the time beset by that 
old device of the devil, of dividing time and affairs 
into secular and sacred. l am trying to emphasize 
the fact that all time is sacred. Money is sacred. 
Business is sacred. How can it be else, if everything 
we do is to be done to the glory of God ? So that, 
having kept Sunday, suppose, we may not use the 
rest of the week for selfish purposes. Having tithed 
our income, say, we are not at liberty to spend the rest 
selfishly. Can it be that a fraction is greater than 
a whole ? 

A great many devices of this latter day to get 
money, return on our own heads to plague us. Now, 
e. g,, we are told that if every one gave a cent a day, 
two cents a day, tithes his income, gives an hour a 
week, pays a quarter or a dollar and is a member of 
this and that, and so on, such and such things will 
happen. Doubtless, for a very great many that 



WHAT THE MASTER EXPECTS OF US. 155 



covers the several ability." But, my lady so and 
so, and millionaire this or that, having no end of 
leisure, no end of money, hear it and fall in — an 
hour a week, two cents a day, a dollar member- 
ship, and wrap themselves up in a comfortable sense 
of duty done. 

That is to say, the 07ie talent man furnishes the 
measure of duty for the ten talent man ! And the 
Master's, "each, according to his several ability," is 
shut up in a box. Two cents a day ! a dollar to 
evangelize the world ! Shades of apostles and mar- 
tyrs ! think of the money that was spent last week 
on a grand entertainment or junketing around for 
one's own pleasure — that elegant new Sevre vase for 
a house already so full of all manner of wares it 
might easily be mistaken for a museum of art ; that 
ten-dollar night at the opera ; that hundred-dollar 
dress, gotten, not because needed, but because all 
the others had been once worn ; that elegant new 
span and coach, with half a dozen standing idle I 

I am not saying that no one is at liberty to have 
choice things or to hear fine music ; much less 
am I attempting to fix the limit of personal ex- 
penditure for anybody whatsoever. But I wish to 
make evident that these sorry devices for cheaply 
easing the conscience, that men may the more read- 
ily lavish money in self-indulgence, had better all be 
swept into eternal forgetfulness, and the Master's, 
" Each, according to his several ability," in view of 
coming and searching accountability, be writ big 
before our eyes. 

Too soon, we cannot come back to the true, Bibli- 



156 BRIGHTENING THE WORLD, 



cal conception of the sacredness of life, time, and 
the world, to see that we are to make the most of 
ourselves, and all that is in us or of us, to bring in 
the glorious, all-comprehending, world-filling king- 
dom of our God. And if we are able to brighten 
but one soul, one household, a square foot or a 
square yard of this world, why, do it ! But if we 
might brighten a city ward, a province, here or 
there, build a lighthouse, equip a whole board of 
missions, is it thought that the Master will accept 
the hundredth part of our possible achievement, and 
pronounce His " Well done ! good and faithful ser- 
vant " ? I trow not. 

Obviously, the sorest test of this principle comes 
with great ability, and so, large opportunity. It is 
practically — however we may account for it, and 
reason it out, that it ought to be just the other way 
— it is practically much easier for the man on five 
hundred dollars a year to bless the world according 
to his ability, than for the man who has twenty-five 
or fifty thousand a year ; for the man who has no 
capital but himself, than for the man who has one 
million or many. 

For a man worth a million dollars — halve it or 
treble it, it is all the same — according to his several 
ability^ to share the burdens of society, the support 
of the Church, minister to the world's evangeliza- 
tion, enlightenment, and amelioration in the way of 
taxation and free gift, is a very unusual thing. 
That it is sometimes done, is possible, and yet it is 
doubtful whether this is really ever so, though it is 
often approached. For the law is, each, according 



WHAT THE MASTER EXPECTS OF US, 157 



to his several ability, the burden of taxation, the re- 
lief of misery, the evangelization of the world ! 

Two hundred and fifty thousand people, repre- 
senting one million out of sixty-five millions, own, 
it is said, three-fourths of the property of this 
country ! But do they bear three-fourths of the bur- 
dens of society ? or one-fourth ? No, not even that. 
Dr. Herron, of Iowa, says that ninety-seven per 
cent, of the people, owning but twenty-five per cent, 
of the property, pay seventy-three per cent, of the 
taxes of the country. It is said that four hundred 
Christian families of our country have an average 
income, above expenses, of five hundred thousand 
dollars each ; eight thousand families a net income 
of twenty-five thousand dollars each ; one hundred 
thousand families an income of ten thousand dollars 
each. If it were tithed for beneficence it would 
yield one hundred and forty million dollars to the 
treasury of the Lord. 

When I was living in New York Mr. was 

reported as returning a certain large sum as per- 
sonal property — pitifully inadequate, however — and 
also as saying that if the city was not satisfied, he 
would put it where it would get less. The question 
in righteousness was not whether he paid a very 
large sum into the city treasury, but whether that 
sum represented his just share of the public ex- 
pense. It is easy to see that, in fairness, the greater 
wealth ought to bear its just proportion. We might 
be tempted to think that it ought cheerfully to do 
so. But we know that it is not so, and it probably 
would be no better if we had the handling of it. 



158 BRIGHTENING THE WORLD, 



And yet there is a vast difference in the way peo- 
ple of wealth look upon and treat the claims of the 
world upon them, because of their ability to do great 
things for the world. If the course of some was the 
course of all there would be little ground for com- 
plaint. That capital bears its share of public, social, 
educational, and religious responsibility will not be 
claimed by anybody. That there is great improve- 
ment, yea, that we have seen rapid strides, and sig- 
nal illustrations of a better spirit and a brighter day, 
is happily true. A Slater, a Gammon, a Hand, a 
Peabody, with their millions for a regenerated 
South, are only outrunners along this line ! 

But is it not clear that capital generally must 
more carefully adjust its broad shoulders to a more 
equitable distribution of burdens ? You are an em- 
ployer and pay salaries from $65 to $125 a month. 
Your attention is fixed for a moment upon salaried 
men — ordinary salaries, not those monumental ones 
with which railroad and insurance companies deco- 
rate their head men at the expense of the public ! 
The men of whom I speak can live comfortably, if 
they only think so ; have a seat in most churches 
and pay something for beneficence ; but what can 
they do — what ought they to be asked to do — to- 
ward building churches, or any of the permanent 
institutions of society, educational, religious, or hu- 
manitarian ? 

Capital often turns to these people as though they 
w^ere not doing their share. They more than do it. 
We need a more kindly and helpful spirit of the 
strong toward the weak. With the strong is all the 



WHAT THE MASTER EXPECTS OF US. 159 



advantage in the race. The rich have the inside 
track on all the good things of life : education, cul- 
ture, art, music, travel, luxury, care in sickness, 
pleasure in health, to go where they please, stay as 
long as they please, dress as they will, house them- 
selves according to their taste ; the inside track, too, 
in all investments of money. A man of small or 
limited income cannot often get in on the ground 
floor of profitable investments. He can get in where 
the risks are great, and into savings where the in- 
come is small. This is one reason, if not the great 
reason, why people of limited means so often catch 
at bait that lures them to destruction. 

A bank is organized by capital for capitalists. 
After three months or six, the small folks can come 
in at twenty-five per cent, advance. A million has 
grow-n in three months or six to one and a quarter 
millions ! I say they have the inside track in all 
things, on the earth and under the earth — in every- 
thing, except that death is not partial, and except 
that the kingdom of heaven is, on the best of au- 
thority, if anything, somewhat more accessible to 
the poor than to the rich. Even here they may, if 
they will, make friends of the mammon of unright- 
eousness who will make them welcome on the plains 
of light. 

Ought not the greatly favored to be considerate, 
very considerate, toward the less favored ? And if 
any of the greatly favored are inclined to think that 
they walk these lofty paths because of some superior 
virtue, or even unusual abilitv in themselves, let them 
be reminded that they are where they are only be- 



l6o BRIGHTENING THE WORLD. 



cause of circumstances put within their reach by a 
century of history and the toil of unrequited mill- 
ions. The power and the opportunity to get wealth 
is God-given. O use it to bless the world, and so, 
bless thyself ! 

Looking out on the great multitude men call 
the proletariat^ Victor Hugo exclaims: "Sacrifice 
to the mob ; sacrifice to that unfortunate, disin- 
herited, vanquished, vagabond, shoeless, famished, 
repudiated, despairing mob ; sacrifice to it, if it 
must be, and when it must be, thy repose, thy fortune, 
thy joy, thy country, thy liberty, thy life; the mob is 
the human race in misery ; the mob is the mournful 
beginning of the people ; the mob is the victim of 
darkness. Sacrifice to it thy gold, and thy blood 
which is more than thy gold, and thy thought 
which is more than thy blood, and thy love which 
is more than thy thought ; sacrifice to it everything 
but justice. Receive its complaint ; listen to it, 
touching its faults and touching the faults of others; 
hear its confession and its accusation. Give it thy 
ear, thy hand, thy arm, thy heart. Do everything 
for it excepting evil. Alas ! it suffers so much and it 
knows nothing. Correct it, warn it, instruct it, guide 
it, train it, put it to the school of honesty. Make it 
spell truth, show it the alphabet of reason, teach it 
to read virtue, probity, generosity." Let us give 
the impassioned appeal our Amen ! The poet is 
oflenest the true prophet, the seer of the clearest 
vision. 

What art thou doing with thy pound ? or thy 

POUNDS? 



XIII. 



THE SUPREME MOTIVE. 

Writing to the Corinthians, Paul lets us into the 
secret of his greatly useful life. To the world, his 
course was a mystery and a blunder. His motives 
were sometimes called in question. At what men 
do not understand they cavil. And just because his 
was more than a personal work he now and then 
turns aside, as in this second letter, to vindicate him- 
self, for the sake of His Master. He declares that 
throughout his ministry, he has been " straightfor- 
ward and veracious," not handling the word of God 
deceitfully ; that his has been a martyr-ministry, of 
the spirit and not of the letter, in the jnajesty of 
truth commending himself to every man's conscience 
in the sight of God. 

In this he had followed the Master and sought to 
please, not men, but Him, Like Festus, men might 
think him beside himself ; even so, it is as seeing 
but God in Christ, and the redeemed world which, 
with all the passion of an ardent nature, he seeks to 
claim for Him. 

How has it come about that a self-seeking Phari- 
see, the goal of his ambition in sight, is found going 
hither and thither on tireless feet, detained before 

(i6i) 



1 62 BRIGHTENING THE WORLD, 



Roman tribunals, tossed on the stormy Adriatic, 
stoned by the mob, held in duress vile, towering in 
proud Athens among sneering philosophers, daunt- 
less in the presence of haughty Rome, always preach- 
ing Christ, the crucified, the Risen One ; once con- 
senting to Stephen's martyrdom, but never forgiving 
himself the shameless atrocity ; the more willing to 
suffer, that he himself had once persecuted the 
Church of God. 

Nor is this all; he is as cheerful as he is courageous. 
He suffers, but he sings. Nothing can sour his tem- 
per or cool his ardor. "Most gladly will I spend 
and be spent for your souls." " I take pleasure in 
weaknesses, in injuries, in necessities, in persecutions, 
in distresses for Christ's sake ! " 

How is all this ? Why, he says that God has fash- 
ioned him to this very end and given him the earnest 
of His Spirit. His lips have been touched as with a 
coal from off God's altar. The impress of the cross 
is on his inmost soul. The passion of Christ for 
humanity has taken possession of him. The power 
that raised up Christ from the dead is working in 
him. And best of all, summing up all, the love that 
gave the Son, the love that endured the cross, is 
prompting him to count everything but loss for the 
excellency of the new knowledge of divine things 
and constraining him to follow in the steps of Christ. 
Self has stepped down and out, and Saul of Tarsus 
is Christ's man, full of His spirit, ready to follow 
the Master and to do His work, at any cost, lead 
where it may. 

Take note, (i) Paul has gained a new point of 



THE SUPREME MOTIVE. 



163 



view. Humanity and the world are viewed from 
the cross. Humanity is a precious seed, and not a 
something to be selfishly used, the weak by the 
strong ; to be enslaved and put at the mercy of cruel 
masters or slaughtered in merciless wars ; to grace 
a triumph or pander to the lusts of conquerors and 
their minions ; but a race of men, in God's image 
made, broken loose from God, and so, beclouded in 
mind, depraved in heart, the prey of evil spirits, and 
torn and consumed by their own disordered passions. 
It can be brought back to Him only through the 
power of a self-sacrificing love. 

Ye are brethren — why do ye so ? Ye are brethren 
— Love one another. Ye were made in God's image, 
and however marred, it may be restored ; however 
debased, it may be lifted up ; the unclean be made 
holy ; the weak, strong ; the bad, good ; the sinner, 
a saint. The race is God's. The Cross is a fact be- 
cause God is the Father of the human race, and 
Christ is not only Son of God, He is also Son of 
Man and a brother. 

(2). He has also got a new estimate of life and 
the world. Our estimates of things are all the 
while changing, from childhood to age. What 
the child values to-day, it casts upon the rubbish 
heap to-morrow. What, to-day, is the pride of the 
savage, to-morrow, to his enlightened eyes, is a 
relic of barbarism, worse than useless— the sorrowful 
reminder of the days when he was no true man. 
What to-day fills all the dreams of youth, to-morrow 
is like a shrivelled leaf in autumn. The bacchanal 
revel in which a man is to-day willing to spend his 



1 64 BRIGHTENING THE WORLD. 



substance, to-morrow is a thing repulsive as death. 
To-day the world is only an arena of selfish ambition, 
and life a scramble for wealth and power ; to-mor- 
row all this is seen to be the baldest atheism the 
rankest infidelity, upon which a man writes — Van- 
ity of vanities, all is vanity'*; for he has seen the 
handwriting on the wall, and he had no God. 

We no sooner put ourselves to school to Christ 
than we find ourselves under the most revolutionary 
of teachers. He sees not as man seeth — For what 
doth it profit a man to gain the whole world and 
forfeit his life ? For what should a man give in ex- 
change for his life ? 

Prosperous man — no room where to bestow his 
goods — writing " my," my,'* all over his possessions 
— planning only for ease, comfort, indolent luxury ! 
Write him a fool, and summon him to judgment ! 

Zaccheus, despised publican, come down, open thy 
house to me. Thou art a son of Abraham. 

Despised Magdalen, they would stone thee, as 
doubtless thou deservest ; but go, and sin no more. 
Thou hast the making of a saint. 

Poor slave lad from darkest Africa, I lay my hand 
upon thee. Thou shalt be a Bishop. Thou shalt 
stand before kings. 

Shepherd lad on Scottish hills, I anoint thee an 
apostle to the nations that know not God. 

Petted son of wealth and culture, envied child of 
fortune, I have larger plans for thee than are 
dreamed of by thy friends in dear old England. 
Thy beautiful culture shall flame for me in Southern 
seas, and thine shall be a martyr's crown. 



THE SUPREME MOTIVE. i65 



Daughter of wealth, they will spoil thee at Fash- 
ion's shrine. Put thy wealth and jewelled splendor 
at my service, and learn what that meaneth: He that 
will be chiefest shall be servant of all. 

But for the new estimate of life and the world 
which attends Christ's coming, all this, the like of 
which the sun never sets upon, would be, if under- 
taken at all, an irksome task. It would be just what 
it still seems to men of the world, who see not with 
Christ's eyes the possibilities of redeemed manhood, 
nor the eternal glory of self-renunciation for the 
sake of others. They believe not upon His word, 
that they who turn many to righteousness shall 
shine as the stars forever and ever, and that, to 
make friends of the mammon of unrighteousness, is 
to be welcomed by them as forerunners into the 
everlasting habitations. 

(3). The Christian view, the Christian estimate, 
have put a new motive into life, which is the secret 
of power. Our motives will not always bear close 
scrutiny, even when doing the Lord's work, unless 
we have learned to be on our guard against all the 
wiles of the devil. Paul was a self-emptied, a 
Christ-filled man. Say not, "I am of Paul, and I of 
Apollos, and I of Cephas." Who are they but the 
Lord's instruments? 

What doest thou, pleasing thyself, pleasing men, 
concerned about thyself, vainglorious man ? Why 
dost thou burn incense to thine own vanity, and 
stand aloof from thy fellows, and seek to make thy 
work tell the story of thy doings rather than herald 
the power of Christ to save ? Why writest thou the 



i66 



BRIGHTENING THE WORLD. 



name of thy sect bigger than the name that is above 
every name upon which rests the Church Universal ? 
Christ's kingdom is bigger than Methodism, though 
that is very big; stronger than Presbyterianism, 
though that is very strong; statelier than the Church 
of England, though that is very stately. For the 
pure love of the Master, with the one prayer in our 
heart — Thy kingdom come ! though all our kingdoms 
perish — let us work to brighten the world. 

The love of Christ is the outgoing of the infinite 
heart of God. Love never faileth. It is the cen- 
tripetal force of the universe. It binds all to God. 
Once it enters the heart of man, it is the great sol- 
vent of all selfish bonds. It promotes brotherhood 
and fraternity. It makes power, whether of rank, or 
wealth, or learning, the servant of the people. It 
creates kindly consideration for all classes and con- 
ditions of men. It forbids all selfish use or mean 
advantage to be taken of fellow man. It prompts 
to rescue the fallen and save the benighted. 

God is love. Christ is love in human conditions. 
What is love like? What will love do? How will 
love carry itself in a world like this ? What does 
love value most, prize highest ? To what uses would 
love put a man ? put learning, culture, wealth, posi- 
tion, official station ? Behold the Christ and know. 
Love never downs or thwarts righteousness. It 
makes a man righteous in his loving, and loving in 
his righteousness, as was the Christ. It gives power 
to overcome prejudice, to forgive enemies, to over- 
come evil with good, to forsake all and follow Him, 
to find delight in paths otherwise forbidding, and 



THE SUPREME MOTIVE. 



167 



to go gladly to the world's end and to martyrdom 
for Him who so loved us and the world. 

All this is possible, and only possible, because the 
Spirit of God, which is love, comes to dwell in us, 
and make of us Christ-bearers, continuing in the 
world the blessed reign He inaugurated of peace 
and good-will to men. The power of God is com- 
mensurate with the plans of God. God is not one 
who fails. This world is not given over to the devil. 
See in the tempted and victorious Christ, the bruiser 
of the serpent's head, that men everywhere may take 
courage and resist the devil till he is put in everlast- 
ing chains and hurts no more. 

Be ye filled with the Spirit. To be filled with the 
Spirit is to be filled with love, and power to save 
men and to brighten the world — to use the one, or 
two, or five, or ten talents; thy wealth, thy culture, thy 
learning, music, art; thy influence over others, over 
childhood, over the depraved, over thy brethren; at 
the bar, in medicine, in the professor's chair, in the 
queenly domain of home, in circles of fashion — if 
thou mayest without guile ; at the teacher's desk, on 
the judge's bench, on the deck of gallant steamer, in 
the bank and in the shop, at thy merchandise or at 
thy trade — all for the glory of God and the good of 
man ! 

Child of God and heir of heaven, wilt thou be 
anointed for the work to which thy Master calls 
thee? Wilt thou suffer Him to bear the cross alone ? 
Carest thou not whether or no He triumphs in this 
world ? Wilt thou in silence hear the unbeliever 
say, Here is something too tough for your 



1 68 BRIGHTENING THE WORLD. 



Christ"? Wilt thou hear the infidel's challenge, 
"Try your hand on this knotty problem," and make 
no response ? Wilt thou say — " Ethiopia cannot be 
made to stretch out her hands unto God ? Nor 
Russia to relax the rigors of her rule patterned after 
her own icy north " ? Wilt thou say that, " War can 
never be banished from the earth and the nations 
learn war no more " ? Dost thou believe that the 
great questions of political economy, and social life, 
of capital and labor, know no law but competition, 
no arbiter but force ? That there is no gospel of 
righteousness to be applied to trade ? That to build 
up one nation at the expense of another is Chris- 
tian ? That the Christ will never wield the sceptres 
of the nations and preside over the commercial re- 
lations of men ? That the law of brotherhood, which 
is the law of love, will never be recognized as wor- 
thy to rule in the supreme as w^ell as the petty inter- 
ests of men ? Dost thou believe that thou hast a re- 
sponsibility commensurate with thy wealth, influ- 
ence, faith, and possibility of good as being filled 
with the Spirit, to set right the wrong, to make 
straight the crooked, the rough places plain, wher- 
ever thou dost meet them ? 

The call of the cross is to thee, as to Him. Thy 
vocation is outlined for thee. The first disciples 
heard that call but saw neither throne nor crown." 
Thou mayest see both if thou wilt open thine eyes. 
The call of the cross will never die on the air till 
the world is brought back to God, and its kingdoms 
are His. There is no other conquering sign but this; 
no way of conquest but that which the Master trod; 



THE SUPREME MOTIVE, 



169 



no motive adequate but love; no other moral force 
omnipotent enough to conquer hate and draw the 
world to God. 

I accept it as true that another has said: "To the 
measure of your capacity, you are as responsible for 
the fate of the world as Jesus was." To bear such 
a responsibility and meet its issues, we too must re- 
ceive from God His all-emancipating, all-inspiring 
love, and then may we say: "I can do all things 
through Christ that strengtheneth me." 

Of Boston^s great preacher and seer, her poet 
sings: 

" Where he trod. 
Love of God 

Blossomed into sight. 
Form and hue 
Lovelier grew 

In the eternal light." 

Such footsteps are possible only to him who lives 
close to the Master, and is content with His ap- 
proval. But this is not a matter for exceptional 
saints. If any man have not the Spirit of Christ he 
is none of His. 



XIV. 



THE BLESSED CHURCH OF GOD. 

It were a great thing, in any measure, truly to en- 
ter into Paul's conception of the Church of God, as 
outlined in his letters to the Corinthians, the Ephe- 
sians, and the Colossians. To be deeply imbued 
with it, and fully possessed by it, is at once to be 
inspired with the loftiest expectations, and to be 
furnished with the weightiest arguments for a con- 
secrated life. As nothing is too good to be antici- 
pated by the Church, so nothing is too great to be 
asked of her. 

The Church is made up of people called out of 
the world into vital union with the Christ. In them, 
singly and collectively. He dwells. 

" Not he that repeateth the name 
But he that doeth the will " 

hath the mark of the true Church on him. 

The bounds of the true Church break over that of 
the visible church as men know it, of many names 
and diverse forms of worship, and reach beyond — 
God only-knows how far. 

" Your visible churches cheat their inward type." 

They gather in of good and bad. 
(170) 



THE BLESSED CHURCH OF GOD. 



171 



" All who love God are in my church embraced, 
Not that I have no sense of preference — 
None deeper ! — but I rather love to draw, 
Even here, on earth, on toward the future law. 
And Heaven's fine etiquette, where * Who ? ' and 
* Whence ? ' 

May not be asked ; and at the Wedding- Feast, 
North shall sit down with South, and West with East." 

In Paul's high thought, the Church is the body of 
Christ. They who really compose it are severally 
members of the same. He is the living, organizing 
Head. He is the fulness of Godhead bodil}^, from 
whom the Church receives the fulness of Him who 
fiUeth all in all." He directs and uses the members 
through which He realizes His will, and in which He 
displays His grace and beauty. His holiness and love. 
All this, in each, and in all, now in limitations, but 
finally without measure. 

Again, the Church is a holy temple in the Lord. 
The words of prophets and apostles its foundation, 
whose corner or binding stone is Christ, in whom all 
truth coheres — the chief corner-stone. Each one in 
vital union with Him is built into this living temple 
of living souls, God making each and all collectively, 
the Shekinah of His presence. So are we prepared 
to read in the Revelation that, in the new Jerusalem 
there is no visible, structural temple, for the Lord 
God and the Lamb are the temple of it. The 
Church is the habitation of God through the Spirit. 

Lovelier still, the Church is the Bride of the 
Christ, in such fellowship with Him now, as, at 
length, to be so transformed through intercourse 



BRIGHTENING THE WORLD. 



with Him, that He will take her to Himself without 
spot or wrinkle, or any such thing, holy and without 
blemish. The aeon that hath no end, will then be- 
gin ; the Church glorified by and in the love of her 
Lord. 

The Sabbaths of eternity 

One Sabbath deep and wide — 

A light upon the shining sea — 
The Bridegroom and His bride." 

Whichever figure we follow out, we are met with 
a great store of riches. The Church which He 
makes His body, glorifies as a holy fane, takes to 
Himself as Bride, fills with His fulness, beautifies 
with His grace, is for the present, though the object 
of His love, left in the world, to witness for Him in 
a Christlike life, to stand up for Him, to be jealous 
of His honor, to seek the ends He sought, to share 
his fortunes as a true bride will — to suffer with Him, 
to be glorified together. 

The possibility of all this is wholly found, and 
only found, in the divine indwelling. Solomon's 
temple, glittering in marble and gold, lacked its 
chief claim to consideration till the divine glory filled 
it. That was an hour supreme, toward which the 
years of building yearned. Apollo, of manly strength 
and beauteous form, is no more the true type of the 
natural man, at his best, than the Church that owns 
and heeds, in love, her Head, is God's thought ex- 
pressed, of man redeemed and spiritually erect in 
righteousness and truth. 

One would fain wait before these high ideals till 
the soul is filled with them. They mean so much, 



THE BLESSED CHURCH OF GOD, 



that, as in the presence of Alp or ocean, we cannot 
take them in, but slowly. All of the Gospel for us 
men seems packed into them — forgiveness, redemp- 
tion, hope, peace, comfort, power, victory, eternity of 
life and love. Build tabernacles here ! Haste and 
do ! Not three, but one for each that sees and loves 
that transfigured One ! The breezes that fan us 
here are such as blow off the Blessed Isles. The 
music that thrills us here is such as the great Ora- 
torios faintly echo, and even so, bring us to the choir- 
ing angels and the redeemed on the sea of glass. 

In these moods of high thinking and clear vision 
we sometimes cease to wonder at those words that 
often stagger thought, viz.: *Ho the intent that now 
unto the principalities and powers in the heavenly 
places might be made known through the Church the 
manifold wisdom of God, according to the eternal 
purpose which He purposed in Christ Jesus our 
Lord." We are moved to say, surely, these mounts 
of vision sometimes reached by happy saints, with 
heaven, as it were, opened, must reveal to the prin- 
cipalities and powers the mysterious things they are 
said to desire to look into. 

And, surely, we mistake as much as did the 
Apostle Peter, of whom it is written, he knew not 
what he said. There was no wisdom in his sugges- 
tion on the holy mount. The favored three were 
not taken up there to abide away from the ills of 
men, the sins and shames of the world, in holy and 
adoring isolation. However good a thing it might 
be in itself, however lean the spirit that never 
mounts these heights, it was like Christ's nights of 



BRIGHTENING THE WORLD, 



prayer, the precursor of days of toil and sacri- 
fice. 

Lo, at the mountain's foot the waking dawn re- 
veals a sight to stir the heart of God. Great agony 
of the parental heart. Childhood possessed of the 
devil, battered, tossed to and fro like an autumn 
leaf in tempest ; helpless men about, by kindly 
feeling stirred, too weak to master the devil and 
bring healing to the child and comfort to the 
father's heart. Tabernacles ? No. Down to the 
tame level of the world and put thy new strength, 
thy vision of God, to use ! Down with the Master! 
Down, and see the might of God in Him — thy 
might to be — for the greater works than these to be 
done at thy hand. Later — the cross and the resur- 
rection behind them — angelic voices break upon 
their ears. "Why stand ye gazing up into heaven, 
men of Galilee ? " O but it is so good to gaze into 
heaven, into the open heaven. Our Lord ! we saw 
Him taken up into the clear Syrian blue till a cloud 
sailed out of it and under His feet and bore Him 
away till the vision faded from our sight. We would 
fain gaze into heaven till He come again. 

These entranced men need to be jostled and 
brought back to earth — need it so much that angels 
are commissioned to remind them of their duty; and 
that, for them, obedience just now is more than 
adoration, and they must watch, and wait, and pray 
till the great promise is fulfilled and the endue- 
ment of power is theirs ; for stirring times are just 
ahead, and only too soon they will be in the thick 
of the fight, and they will know what that meaneth 



THE BLESSED CHURCH OF GOD. 



— "If they have persecuted Me they will persecute 
you also." They will remember the prayer : "Not 
that thou shouldest take them out of the world, but 
that thou shouldest keep them from the evil." 

So the Apostle Paul in these great letters that 
rise to such heights and pierce to such depths, seeks 
to take these early believers with him, only to get 
the greater leverage on them, that they may throw 
themselves into the evil world and fight its wrongs, 
as a great general inspires his battalions with his 
own deathless courage, to hurl them against oppos- 
ing hosts and break their serried strength. 

Nor for them alone does he write — for us, no 
less, upon whom the ends of the world are come. 
How he summons them, and as truly us, on the 
strength ot these great, divine realities, to be living 
epistles of Christlike love and righteousness, known 
and read of all men. Thy body a temple of the 
Holy Ghost ; flee the lusts of the flesh that war 
against the soul. Thy inmost self the Shekinah of 
the Divine presence ; have no other God but Je- 
hovah. Heed the sacrifice of God and worship Him 
in spirit and in truth. The Church the body of 
Christ; be then in willing subjection to the Head. 
Be in sympathetic fellowship with each other, for 
ye are members one of another. O Bride of Christ; 
the chiefest of ten thousand is thine, the altogether 
lovely, the depth of whose love, as well the measure 
of thy undone estate, only the cross could express — 
Go not after other lovers in faithless, shameless infi- 
delity. 

How the Apostle brings the transcendent truths 



176 BRIGHTENING THE WORLD. 



that language labors to express down to the duties 
we owe to each other, to society, to rulers, to the 
home, to children, to parents, to masters, to ser- 
vants, telling the Church how to be the salt of the 
earth, the light of the world, her appointed mission. 
Right here, in the great letter to the Ephesians, full 
of the deepest spiritualities of the Gospel, charged 
with the sublimest possibilities of redemption, re- 
vealing heights that we need often to climb, he 
will not leave them on the mount, but down, on the 
levels of the world, he throws open the arsenal of 
the Christianas warfare and bids them put on the 
whole armor of God ; then draws the veil and dis- 
closes the principalities, the powers, the world- 
rulers of this darkness, the spiritual hosts of wicked- 
ness with which they must wrestle, and for which 
they need to be clad in the panoply of God, that 
they " may be able to withstand in the evil day, and 
having done all, to stand.'' 

This is Paul's conception of the Gospel, of the 
Church, of Christian duty. This is the way Paul 
handles the sublimest of spiritual themes. Recalls 
the Church up where she is bathed in the light of 
heaven, flooded with the glory of the world to come. 
Thus filled with the power and energy of the Holy 
Ghost he turns her gaze upon the world that is still 
full of cruel wrongs and great unrest, of greed and 
strife, of surging passions and clashing interests, 
and bids her teach mankind, in the name of the 
living Head of redeemed humanity, how to live as 
brothers, how to cool this feverish unrest, how to 
take life out of the strife of competition, to make 



THE BLESSED CHURCH OF GOD, 



culture the handmaid of ignorance, strength the 
staff of the weak, wealth the minister to the neces- 
sities of an impoverished world. 

Go, drink deep of the spirit of the Master, then 
come teach men how to do by others as they would 
be done by. Go, get a vision of the unsullied purity 
of God and the delights of His sons and daughters, 
and then separate thyself from all of evil, withdraw 
thyself from all vile associations, measures, abomi- 
nations of wickedness, and give thyself wholly to the 
kingdom of the truth ! 

But dissenting voices not a few are on the air : 
" Now, Paul, you really have made a mistake and 
spoiled your letter. If you had just stopped when 
you had taken us up as to the vestibule of heaven, 
where we were so entranced, so comfortable and so 
happy, we would have liked it a great deal better. 
We do so love truth in the abstract ! Even if we 
don't half understand it, it sets us off feeling after 
infinity, and wandering away into space, away from 
this prosaic world ! That we call preaching the 
Gospel. 

" But, Paul, the moment you bring religion down 
into politics, and trade, and amusements, home life 
and citizen life, out of the clouds down to our every- 
day matters, it seems like sacrilege, and we get all 
tangled up in our thinking, and ruffled in our feel- 
ings, and it seems as though religion had lost her 
wings and instead got only feet and hands, and had 
come to stay among us and keep us company, week- 
days as well as Sundays. Now that is not what we 
want of religion. We want our service of God all 



178 



BRIGHTENING THE WORLD, 



apart by itself, like Sunday. Let Christ look after 
the devil and the world, and let us enjoy ourselves." 

This truthfully tells the attitude of too many and 
for too long ; and only Divine Omniscience knows 
how much the Church has suffered by the unscrip- 
tural divorce of ethics from religion, the Sermon on 
the Mount from the Cross, practice from the theory 
of life ; and how much the estrangement of multi- 
tudes from, the Church is due to this very cause. 

The sacred privileges and immortal hopes of the 
Church are the best indication of her bounden duty 
to the world. No one so well knows the meaning 
of the Gospel and the needs of men without it, as he 
who has been spiritually enlightened. No one so 
clearly sees the error of the selfish maxims of the 
world as he who has been brought to see and love 
the law of brotherhood. The apostles bring to us 
what they had seen, heard, and handled of the Word 
made flesh. We can do no less than listen. So will 
the world hang on thy lips, if, as a Christ-freed man, 
you go in His spirit to the needy, unrestful world. 

Put in the place of the socialism of unbelief and 
anarchy, the socialism of Christian brotherhood, or- 
dered in fellowship and in righteousness. Put the 
patriotic impulse in the place of partisan zeal. Put 
the statesman where the politician now serves him- 
self. Ennoble politics. Ask for trade fairness ; 
what is just and equal. Give to labor her due meas- 
ure of labor's increase. Restrain the wasters of 
society and the home, and frown the lecherous out 
of thy sight. Nothing human, nothing that affects 
human welfare is, or can be, alien to the Church of 



THE BLESSED CHURCH OF GOD. 



Him who is every man's brother, and whose all-em- 
bracing love calls out in might and tenderness — 
^'Come unto Me, all ye who labor and are heavy 
laden, and I will give you rest." 

It is not enough for thee to say thy creed and 
pronounce thy shibboleths of orthodoxy. Hast thou 
caught the Christ-spirit, O Church of the Redeemer ? 
If any man have not the spirit of Christ he is none 
of His. 

How can less be asked of the Church of Jesus, the 
Christ ? She is a temple^ holy unto the Lord, where 
sacrifice and a pure offering are given unto the 
Father, who gave the Son, in His love for the world. 
Thou canst not be exclusive. 

She is His body ^ who said — " If any man love me, 
he will keep my word ; and my Father will love him, 
and we will come unto him, and make our abode 
with him"! That "tremendous We"! We will 
make our abode with him ! Will that make a man, 
a church, narrow in her sympathies, apathetic toward 
the great world's need? To dwell in us, will it take 
the heart out of God, or will it put the heart of God 
into us ? Will it belittle Him, or greaten us ? 

She is His bride^ she owes Him all things. He has 
dowered her with all His grace and beauty, having 
won her by self-sacrificing love. He has made 
her, with Himself, an heir of God. Can she do less 
than share His great purpose ? Aim at anything 
less than realizing all that His soul travails for ? 
Content to be any other than the glorious Church 
He would make her — as broad, as all-inclusive, as 
pure, as loving, as potential, as loyal, as faithful, as 



l8o BRIGHTENING THE WORLD. 



He would have her be ? Will she rob Him, through 
neglect, of one of the many crowns destined for His 
brow ? 

Temple, or body, or bride — each figure of speech 
carries in itself a reality so grand, that it can accom- 
modate itself to no narrow view of man and God, 
and human life. Privilege and duty walk hand in 
hand in the high places of the earth, and love and 
righteousness, on tireless feet, rest not till they have 
borne to the world's end the story of the good news 
of God. 

There is a word in the Old Testament that the 
New takes up, sweetens, broadens, and sends on its 
way. Out of Zion shall go forth the law and the 
word of the Lord from Jerusalem ! What Zion and 
Jerusalem were to the Old Dispensation, the Blessed 
Church of God is to the New ; and the word of the 
Lord and the law find themselves in the Word made 
flesh. Only Church and Gospel mean vastly more 
than Zion and law, of old. But note, out of Zion, 
out from the Church which is God's habitation 
through the Spirit, shall go forth the message of life, 
the authoritative rule of conduct ; for it is hers — 
faithless is she if she do it not — to voice the Sermon 
on the Mount and seek to translate it into life. 

This may seem a great assumption. But it is not 
an assumption, it is a commission. The Church will 
doubtless be thought inadequate. The vessel is 
earthen, but the treasure is divine. Looking the 
Church over, men turn aside and say: "Why, this is 
common clay. Life ! why, this is not remarkable — 
it is faulty on every side. Speech ! why, this in no- 



THE BLESSED CHURCH OF GOD. igi 

wise matches the wisdom of the schools. The law 
go forth from the Church ! The Church of God 
carry the destiny of the world in her hands ! Ab- 
surd ! " 

Is it any wonder that art, science, and philosophy, 
that Schoolcraft and statecraft, should make light 
of such high pretensions, and turn on the heel in 
pity or derision ? Call the roll of the Church, and 
as each one answers, over against the name down 
goes the disparaging act, or idle word " spoken, or 
trait of character proverbially mean. But here and 
there one escapes who walks so close with God, no 
railing accusation is writ against him ! Scrutinize 
the history of any one so-called church, become 
familiar with its ins and outs, its frailties and its 
foibles, its family jars and discords ! Give law to 
the world ! Give law, first, to itself ! 

True, all of it true. But there is more than ap- 
pears. There was once one of these depised ones 
whose bodily presence was weak, they said, and his 
speech contemptible. But he flamed like a torch 
over Asia. He planted the cross in Antioch, Ephe- 
sus, Corinth, Athens, and Rome. He spoke the 
word that took root in these great centres of 
heathen, of military and scholastic power. The 
little churches at which they sneered at first, they 
persecuted at last, as they grew by the might of the 
word of their testimony, and the power of their 
unique and saintly lives. 

This very same Church of the despised Nazarene 
that, of old, occupied the capital cities from Alex- 
andria and Jerusalem to Rome, and actually gave 



1 82 BRIGHTENING THE WORLD. 



law to society, and ruled in the State, is all the 
time raising up and sending out men and women of 
apostolic spirit, whose footsteps are traced over 
continents and seas, whose presence is known by the 
watch-fires they have kindled in lonely islands of 
the deep, among wild and cruel men, on mountain- 
top and in valley, girdling the world. 

Year in and out are gathered up the dimes and 
the dollars, the pence and the pounds, that grow 
into millions, to fertilize the world — love's offering 
to her Lord. Year in and out go the sisters of 
charity and the messengers of the King, to and fro, 
in city wards of feverish contagion, in stuffy tene- 
ments, among the poor and the lowly, out on the 
frontier, in the miner's cabin and the freedman's 
shanty. Hospitals, schools, colleges, federations of 
men all bent on making the truth known and Christ 
actual in human life, spring up where the blessed 
Church of God thrives. 

Because of the Church, the most puissant peoples 
of the earth take their law, at least, in large meas- 
ure, from Christ, and write His name on theirs. 
The vessel is earthen. The Church is faulty. O 
sometimes stupidly faulty ! Does God dwell in her? 
Is this man Christ-possessed ? Is this conduct, 
method of business, habit of life, Christ-inspired? 
Is this the Bride of Christ? How the Divinity is 
hidden! Yes, hidden; but if Divinity be indeed 
there, the issue is certain. 

Put these two things together — the Church as we 
know it to be and to have been, and the trophies she 
has won and wins, her march of conquest through 



THE BLESSED CHURCH OF GOD. 



183 



the world ! How can these things be, if the Spirit 
of the living God be not in her? Yea, ^^it is not by- 
might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, saith the 
Lord." There is no other account of the matter. 
We will come unto him and make our abode with 
him. To principalities and powers shall be known 
— not through Gabriers trump, nor Socratic school, 
nor scientific savants — but through the Church, shall 
be known the manifold wisdom of God, according 
to His eternal and eternally ripening purpose in 
Christ. 

Blessed Church of God, thou mayest well be hum- 
ble. The very boast of our day — our associations 
of this and that, without number, while they pro- 
claim the vitality of some, make known the neglect 
of the many. This newest fad — this cumbrous ^^In- 
stitutional" before that Christ-born word, Church 
— like the big, commonplace portico that hides the 
Pantheon — born of what is it, but that the churches 
have failed to prove themselves the institutes they 
were meant, in truth to be, touching the many-sided 
need of the world with a many-handed, many-voiced 
ministry of love ! O blessed Church of God, thou 
art but half awake to thy great mission ! Shake 
thyself from sloth. From the dust arise, shine. 
Broaden thy sympathies, O Bride of Christ, and 
gird thyself from the wantons of thy careless amours 
with the world, in a new loyalty to thy celestial 
Bridegroom ! Thy Lord would use thy voice to 
speak for Him, thy heart to love for Him, thy feet 
to run for Him, till men shall say: "How beautiful 
upon the mountains are the feet of him that bring- 



BRIGHTENING THE WORLD. 



eth good tidings, that publisheth peace thy hands 
to work for Him, thy purse upon His altar to lay up 
for thyself treasure in heaven. Then will the way of 
thy feet to the judgment be prepared for thee, to hear 
Him say: "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of 
the least of these, ye have done it unto me" ! 

The isles wait for His law. The thrones of the 
earth wait for it. The armies of Europe whose 
tread shakes the earth, whose onset of battle will 
make Europe an Aceldama, wait for it. "The white 
fleet," carrying black death in her hulls, waits for it. 
Trade waits for it. Labor waits for it. Learning 
waits for it. Capital waits for it. The rich, the 
poor, the polyglot of tongues, the mingled hues of 
race, all wait for it — restless, unsatisfied, chaotic, 
wasteful and wasting, till it come — Christ's Word 
of life and peace, of righteousness and truth, which 
He bids thee take abroad, and with it sow the world. 
For out of Zion, out of thee, O blessed Church of 
God, shall go forth the law, when the Lord hath en- 
larged thy heart, and inflamed thy soul and opened 
thy mouth. Then shall it be said: Thy light is come, 
the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee, the days of 
thy mourning are ended, and the earth is glad in thy 
light and joyful in thy holy mirth. The desert 
blooms ! The world is brightened ! 



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